Chapter 3 Mistakes That Cost Doctoral Students Months of Revisions

Hi everybody, I am Dr. Courtney Watson, and today we are going to talk about dissertation chapter 3. Chapter 3 is an interesting juncture in your dissertation journey because you're almost through with a major milestone, the first big phase of your dissertation process. You can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel, but you're not there yet. Chapter 3 is one that I spend a lot of time talking about with my clients, both for coaching and editing, and also my own students as well. It's a curious place in the dissertation, and it does give people a fair amount amount of problems. So I find it's one that's really useful to talk about at length and to get your questions answered. It's unexpected sometimes for it to, for the, for it to present so many issues just because it's the shortest chapter of the dissertation usually, but it's also one that has a lot of moving parts to it, and it's one that demands a whole lot of precision. And it asks you to think about things that maybe you haven't thought about before in the dissertation process because it's not your introduction, it's not your literature review, and so it's demanding new things of you as a researcher and a scholar, and a lot of things that really bear thinking about before you are in the thick of it with your research study. So that is something to kind of think about and to really try to think through those questions and technical concerns that are going to crop up before you are, before you actually do have your research underway. So remember something that you always want to keep in mind with Chapter 3 and with the design and the methodology of your study is you want to make it universal enough so that at least theoretically the study could be replicated because that is the goal of pretty much every research study. The, the goal is for it to be replicated down the road. If somebody wants to, you know, redo the project, they have the tools that they would need and you've left enough, enough breadcrumbs and enough of a trail that they would be able to do that successfully. So So with my editing and my coaching clients and my own students, these are all reasons why we spend a lot of time on Chapter 3. And today I'm going to go through the different sections step by step and discuss how each one works and what some of the common traps and pitfalls are that researchers fall into when they're working on them. So first, and as always, as ever, know the specific requirements of your program. Today we're going to talk about standard sections of Chapter 3, whether you're working on qualitative or quantitative or mixed methods. But some of these sections might not be required by your program, and your program might have additional requirements for Chapter 3, uh, that are maybe a little bit more atypical. So just keep that in mind and always, always check your program requirements. And anyway, it's just a good practice if you haven't yet, make sure that you talk to your chair or someone in your department so that you can see copies of dissertations that have been successfully defended and passed in your program recently, so within the past couple years. This gives you a good idea of the conventions that are adhered to by your department, what the expectations are, particularly for things like length and scope and depth of the dissertation. So the first section, of course, is the introduction. This is typically fairly brief, anywhere from several paragraphs to a few pages, depending on what discipline you're writing in. Keep that in mind that brevity wins the day with the introduction here. And what you really want to come across in this is why the study is being done, what is imperative about this study being done. So for your introduction, the first key part of that will be your purpose statement. And that's where you really want to answer the question, you know, why this study? Like, why are you dedicating your, your time and talent and effort to pursuing this particular vein of research, this particular avenue? So why this study, and then why now is another key part of the purpose statement. So make sure that you're explaining why you're doing it and why there's urgency and momentum right now for this to be done. So maybe it's, you know, some problem has been recently exacerbated, or maybe it's a, there's a turning point or potential for a turning point in this topical area. Whatever it is, just make sure that you're explaining it. So you have your purpose statement. After your purpose statement, you want to do your problem statement. So for the problem statement, you want to address the history of the problem, also give a sense of the scope of the problem. And when you're talking about the scope, you want to cover like, well, for whom is this a problem in the first place? What is the severity or urgency of this problem? Like, what are the stakes? What's at stake with this? You want to briefly discuss where and how you discovered the gap in the literature that showed you that this study is needed, that it's urgent and necessary. And then you also want to give a sense of the boundaries of the problem. Where does the problem start and where does the problem stop? For example, if you were proposing a study on a particular K-12 school district and you're looking at grades 3 through 5, well, the boundaries of that stop at the edge of your school district that you're looking at and within those two grades. The narrow, the scope of the problem is pretty narrow in that case. So once you do that, then you are going to include your research questions. And these can be listed verbatim as you had them in your introduction, or you might also have them listed in your literature review as well. So just list that question. In some programs, they will ask you to list a hypothesis or two as well. That is program-specific. So check the requirements of your program, check the template just to get an idea of what the expectations are for that. After you pose the questions, the next section of the introduction will be offering an overview of the structure of the chapter. So what will be included in the chapter? What will it encompass? And it's pretty much all of the, the usual suspects for the different sections that are listed on the template that you have, but you do want to state that within the introduction. And you also want to make sure that you're writing in future tense. Until your proposal is defended. So once your proposal is defended, you'll go back and change it into past tense, but for now you are speaking about your study as something that is going to be done in the future, so use the tense, the future tense, accordingly. The next section of Chapter 3 is research design. So you're going to talk about what your chosen design is. So this could be qualitative, it could be quantitative, or it could be a mixed methods design. Once you have talked about what your selected design is, you wanna offer the rationale for why the design that you chose makes the most sense for your proposed study. So in this area, you would cite relevant literature or similar studies to the study that you're proposing. You would talk about, you know, the research design that they used, or you could go in the opposite direction and say, you know, so far in this topical area of the problem I'm studying, there have only been quantitative studies. There's only been quantitative research. Research done. So I wanted to do qualitative so I could expand the scope of understanding that we have by having this rich vein of data as far as what people say and think about this and what comes out in qualitative interviews. So you can draw from what you've learned in your literature review about, you know, what's the best rationale, what's the best way forward, but you want to spend at least a couple paragraphs, a few paragraphs talking about what your design is, why you chose it, why you are confident as a researcher and someone who is very familiar with the topic, why you're confident that it's the best way to go with it. In the research design section, you also want to talk about the theoretical underpinnings of your research. So you'll introduce your theory or your conceptual framework if you fashioned together multiple theories. To use as your critical lens for your analysis. A good practice can be to mention some of the other contenders and then be clear on why you landed on the one that you did. So for instance, if your study was focused on women CEOs, you would say something to the effect of, since this study is focused on the rise of women CEOs in Fortune 500 companies, it felt imperative to apply a feminist critical lens. You could also say something like, well, I knew I wanted to do comparative analysis or this study calls for comparative analysis, or comparative analysis is the most logical approach to this study. So I am using grounded theory for my critical lens to this study. And whatever you're using, just make sure that you can defend it with a logical rationale. Talking about theory is something that trips up a lot of scholars because a lot of us are used to using it, but it's also something that can be difficult to discuss. So figure out exactly what you want to say with it. This is something that it's good to go to your outline and really map out what you want to talk about, but you can put that together fairly easily, put that section together fairly easily. The next section of Chapter 3 is population. So with the population, you want to talk about who are your participants or your proposed participants for the study, and then you want to defend that. You want to, you know, show your work as a scholar and talk about why this group makes the most sense for this study to be the, the group that is observed for this study. And then you want to go further than that, and you want to say how you propose, you know, acquiring participants for your study. So what are you proposing? What are the methods of outreach that you're going to use? So you can say that you're reaching out through a particular mailing list or a website. If you have a professional affiliation that you're leveraging, whether like a professional organization, a professional society, anything like that, you would want to talk about how that is your plan. You could also say, well, um, depending on the sample size that I get, I may also use snowball sampling, which is just getting people you've already enrolled in the study to reach out to their contacts and their networks, um, so that you can enroll more people through your existing participant list. And also just generally give a sense of where you're finding or where you're proposing to find, uh, your participants. So with this, when you're talking about your participants, you also want to offer some insight into the criteria that you're using to recruit participants. So you want to look at inclusion and talk about the characteristics that your participants must have in order to be eligible for the study. And equally, you want to talk about what is— what would exclude people from the study. So what can they not have? So for the K-12 example, they couldn't be in a different school district or have fewer than 5 years experience. When you're talking about your inclusion and exclusion criteria, the easiest way to open that discussion is through demographics. So talking about what demographics are being considered— the way that you can divide out demographics depends on what makes the most sense for your study. But some examples would be age, profession, education, race, socioeconomic status. You can also narrow your criteria with experience and location. Like if you were saying, if you were doing a study and you were looking specifically at the, the southeastern portion of the country, so you are only looking in the southeast, or you are only looking for participants who have, you know, a decade's worth of experience in this particular field. So you want to show how you have narrowed your search criteria. In this section, you also want to talk about sample size. So how many participants are you aiming for and why? You want to offer you know, the, the scholarly rationale for how many participants you have. So at what number do you think you'll reach saturation? So when we talk about saturation, that is the point in a research study where no new information is being gleaned. So if you have, you know, if you're aiming for like many studies aim for like 12 to 20 participants, um, and that's kind of a magic number because that is the point where the data start to get redundant and you start hearing, especially in qualitative, uh, studies, You start hearing the same thing over and over again. So you've reached that point of saturation. This is a really good time when you're trying to determine what your sample size will be. You want to have a conversation either with your chair about this, or if you have access to a methodologist, you would want to talk to your methodologist about this if one is available to you. And this is just like we— the reason we have sample size is because one, You don't want to have a study that's, that's too enormous, that's too big, but you also want to have a study that's large enough that you're getting meaningful information, like the data you're getting has that preponderance so that there's, there's enough people participating that what is coming out of it is something that you can do something with as a researcher and you can draw some conclusions from it. But just keep in mind, at a certain point you won't get any new information, but you do want to be able to talk about how you landed on the sample size that you landed on and how you, like, how many participants participants you're aiming for. So if what you really want is 12 or 15, then you probably want to have 20 people enrolled in the study just because, you know, things happen, participants drop out. And make sure you have a few over and above what your bottom number is, like that bottom, like, critical mass that you have to achieve in order to have a viable sample size. In the next section of Chapter 3, talking about your methods, you want to talk about instrumentation. So what are the tools that you will be using to conduct your research? So in this section, you can talk about the software that you're using. So for instance, if you're, if you know you're gonna be using NVivo for coding data, if you're doing quantitative and you know you're gonna be using like Atlas or Excel, uh, you would want to talk about, um, what those tools are, what those, what the software is. And typically the software that you use will largely depend on whether you're doing a qualitative research design or a quantitative research design. With mixed methods, you very well could be using both. You could be using multiple pieces of software. You can talk a bit about how you determined what software you wanted to use. Typically though, for most researchers, it's— it comes down to they either use something that was recommended to them by their chair or their committee members, or they use whatever their department or university already has access to. So if there's— check and see if your university already has access or a paid subscription to a particular kind of software. And that, that typically is what the determining factor is for a lot of people, is if the university is already paying for something, unless you have a really good reason for using something that you don't already have access to. If you're doing surveys, like, if you're like doing quantitative and you're doing surveys, you want to talk about like, well, what kind of survey are you doing? You want to talk about the responses. So if you're using using like a 7-point Likert scale, you want to talk about that. And you want to talk about, well, why did you— why do you think that this is the best, the best way to do this? And you ground that, of course, in the research that you've done. You can cite some sources and say, well, according to this source, for this type of study, this is the best kind of survey to do. I see. Let's talk about how you settled on the kind of survey you settled on. And you'll talk about what is really useful for your research design, or what pairs really well with your research design. And really, through Throughout this process, you want to constantly be answering that question, why? Some parts of research feel like talking to a 6-year-old where it's just like, well, why, why, why are we doing this? Why not this? Why this way? And it can feel redundant. A lot of the research process feels redundant, but there's safety in those redundancies. There's a reason why we have those redundancies built into the research process. They're just additional safeguards to make sure that we're conducting research in a really responsible way. If you're doing a qualitative study and you're doing interviews, You would want to talk about the interview techniques and protocols that you're going to have in place and that you're going to be using. You want to talk about how you'll be conducting the interviews. Will they be group interviews or will they be individual interviews? Will they be closed questioning or will they be open-ended? If they are open-ended, do you have some follow-up questions lined up? Those are all important things to think through. And what you really want to get at in this section is why you think the method that you've chose is likely to yield the richest data, to give the most information. And you want to talk about why you think it'll be the most valid, the most reliable. This is also a place where if you're doing, if you're doing any sort of practice run or a small sample, you would want to talk about that as well. Like if you're running your questions through with colleagues to get their insight, or to get some sample responses before you, you do the actual real thing, this is a place where you would talk about that. The next section of Chapter 3 is data collection. Again, this is an area where you want to be pretty exhaustive with what you're talking about. So here you will go through your methods step by step to the point where it can feel like you're really like in the weeds with the minutiae, but that's just, that's what you've got to do in this section. So go through your methods step by step, how you are going to conduct each interview, how you're approaching your participants, like all of it. Don't feel like you're giving too much detail here. Take a look at some of the samples you have access to, and you'll see that there is a lot of detail involved with talking about data collection. So be very thorough, offer a lot of detail, and also don't make assumptions about what the reader knows. Don't think to yourself like, oh well, any researcher knows this, I don't need to say this. You very well might need to say it. So think about that and really don't— in this section, I would tend to overdo it rather than risk underdoing it and not, not getting enough information in there. Because someone will come back to you, whether it's your chair or your editor or a member of your committee, and they'll say, wait, wait, wait, you forgot to say this. Because remember, like, even though it might feel painstaking and redundant, and that's— and honestly, that's because it is, it is painstaking and it is redundant. But remember that the goal is to create a study that can be replicated. It's not considered to be a sound study if there's not enough information in it to replicate it. So always keep that in your mind. So if another scholar wanted to repeat your study, they should have everything that they need in order to do so, at least theoretically. And again, if you do decide to do a pilot study to determine your sample size or anything like that, you would want to talk about it here and mention any variations So anything that— if anything unexpected comes up, what, what is the plan? This is kind of your roadmap to the plan. The next section is the data analysis section. So you talk about how you're planning to evaluate the data. So you would want to talk about any coding methods that you'd be using for thematic analysis. What will those specific codes look like? If you're gonna have 7 or 8 codes, In this section, you want to talk about like, well, what, what does each code stand for? What is, you know, what theme does each code reference? And then also talk about how you landed on those specific themes that you're, that you're looking for, that you're using. And this can come from other research, this can come from, you know, recommendations, but just talk about how you decided on the themes that you decided on. And, you know, just be in this section, be very, very clear about which methods you intend to use for coding the data, for analyzing the data, and for, you know, evaluating all of this information that you're gonna get in, in just an absolute flood. Because when you get the study done and all of it starts coming in, you'll see there's just reams and reams and reams of information that you have to go through. So you want to talk here about how you're gonna organize it. The next section is where you talk about the ethical constraints of your study, and you want to show that your study conforms to the university— your university's ethical requirements so what's going through your institutional review board, what that application looked like. You'll probably be asked to put a copy of your IRB application in the appendix of your dissertation, but you do— here is the place where you really want to talk about that process and what that process looked like. So you'll affirm that you did in fact go through the IRB process or that you were in the process of going through the IRB process You want to talk about any consent forms that you're using, any assurances that you're giving about confidentiality or privacy. One mistake I see a lot of researchers make is they talk about how the participation in the study is anonymous. It's not anonymous. Like, you might give participants different names or code them in specific ways, but instead of saying anonymity, just say that it's confidential and private. Participation is confidential. So you want to talk about the consent forms, what is on the consent forms, why you chose what's on the consent forms. And you might just be using like a standard consent form provided by your university, and that's fine. If it is just like a boilerplate consent form, that's okay. But you do want to talk about what some of the different sections in that consent form are. You also want to talk about the safeguards that you have in place to protect the data that you're getting. So some of the things you'll talk about in this section would be, um, how is the data being stored? Where is it being stored? Uh, so for instance, if you're using, um, an external hard drive to store the data, you would want to go ahead and say that. And then you want to say where that is being held. So say this is in a, a locked office and the researcher is the only one with the key or a locked drawer in an office and the researcher has the key. Uh, and then you would also want to talk about like what your intentions are to maintain contain that data. So who will have access to it? Hopefully no one will have access to it except for you and maybe your methodologist. And you would also want to talk about what the long-term plans for the data are. Typically in most studies, or for most dissertations at least, I— you'll hold on to it for 3 years and then it will be destroyed. So you'll say data will be kept secure for 3 years and then it will be destroyed. You don't really have to specify the method of that destruction, more than likely it's just going to be deleted, but just say that it's going to be destroyed and give an idea of when. The next section of Chapter 3 is limitations and delimitations. So in this section, you want to talk about what are some possible shortcomings of your study. It's not great to think about, but every, you know, it's incumbent upon every researcher to think about, you know, what are the boundaries of this study? What can this study do? What can this study not do and why? So first, to talk about the limitations. Limitations, the best way to think of them is just things that you can't control. So when we talk about limitations, we're thinking about things like sample size. You might wish that you had 100 participants enrolled in your study. That's probably not realistic, uh, for one. Um, and you know, you might, you might be lucky to get a dozen. You might be lucky to get 20. That's why talking about that saturation point is so important. Like for a lot of studies you don't need 100 because you're gonna get the information that you need out of the first 15, and anything over and above that would be redundant, and there would be a law of diminishing returns there. So talk about things that you can't control for this with your limitations. So sample size, budget— as researchers, our budgets are not unlimited. So the constraints of budget might be like you had a grant for a particular amount, or the surveys cost a particular amount, or access to software cost a particular amount. But that's something else that you you could list as a limitation. Another limitation is time. A lot of researchers would love to be doing like long-term longitudinal studies that span years, but that's just not realistic in the context of a dissertation. So maybe in your next project you'll have a couple years to run your study, but you don't have that amount of time right now. So you could say, you know, I had, I had 6 weeks to do this, or I needed to do this within the span of the semester. So think about what your time constraints are, and those can be listed as limitations. You also want to talk about like why your study is valid despite the limitations, like why it's still important, why it's still contributing important data and information. And then in the next section, you want to talk about your delimitations. So delimitations, a good way to think about those are just like the boundaries that you set as a researcher. So you're working with a specific population, like you were working with a population in the southeast region of the country, And maybe it would be a very different study if you were doing it in the Northwest instead. But that's a limitation or a delimitation that you've set on the study. Another might be working with like a specific demographic, like you wanted to work with children in grades 3 through 5. And so, you know, you don't have information about college freshmen instead. Think about your delimitations in that way and then talk about why you set those specific limits. Maybe what you really want is information from, you know, a public school and those grades 3 through 5, and looking at other grades wouldn't be as useful because they're not doing the specific tests that you're looking at in those years. This is something that on its surface might sound obvious, but it is something that you need to think through and just to be able to discuss in the context of your project. And then finally, the final section of Chapter 3 is the conclusion. Your conclusion is just a quick summary of the chapter, like what did you talk about in the chapter, and then you also want to look ahead to Chapter 4 and talk about what's going to happen in Chapter 4. So this has been a fairly quick run-through of Chapter 3, your methods section of your dissertation. If you have any questions, please ask them in the community, and I'm excited to talk to you about them. So have a good day everyone, and happy writing, happy researching!