Don't Make This DISASTROUS Dissertation Mistake

Your dissertation outline becomes the blueprint for you finishing your degree. I have found that if you skip this process, if you rush through it, it actually ends up taking you longer to finish. So take some time to figure out what your outline is going to be and then you can move forward quickly and efficiently. I'm Dr. Steve Tippins and I've sat on over 300 dissertation committees and helped scores of people finish their dissertations. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the steps to make a strong dissert outline, one that keeps you organized, on track, aligned and able to finish. You can think of a dissertation outline as your dissertation GPS because without it you might get lost and it can definitely take you longer to get to where you want to go. A good outline is going to keep you aligned with your committee's expectations, give you the path forward to finishing, and hopefully avoid any rewrites later. Many schools we start with a prospectus. And a prospectus is simply here's what I want to do. A very short brief, maybe even 10 pages. But from there we build an outline to be able to complete the entire dissertation. Over the years I've seen students start writing, just jump into things without really knowing where they're going, without really following an outline. And it ultimately slowed them down because the outline lets you know what you need to have in a dissertation. So let's talk about and figure out what is needed for a good outline. I guess the first thing I want to say is don't start until you know the rules. And by the rules. Let's talk to your committee, see what your committee wants you to put forward. Many times what your committee wants is what your university has provided. There can be a rubric or an outline of your dissertation. You can ask your chair for that, or you can ask an advisor at your university. But having this is going to be gold for helping you move forward. This rubric or outline provided by your school is really important for you. It's going to provide here's chapter one, here's chapter two, here's all the chapters, and here are the headings we want. So it gives you a great foundation for moving forward. And if your school does not provide a rubric and it's most do, but there are some that don't. One of the best ways to find out, you can ask your chair if they have anything, but you can also go to your library and look at a recent dissertation that your chair has chaired or at least been involved in and find out what they have approved and that's going to give you oh, in chapter one, they want this, this and this. And in chapter two they've accepted these things. So it can be a proxy for a university outline. One of the things that's important in an outline is the title. It's the beginning of your journey. So you want to get your title dialed in pretty quickly. It should reflect your problem and your purpose. Be clear. You know, some people think that if you put a colon in the title, it's going to be accepted more easily. I haven't found that to be the case, but many times you see titles in peer reviewed articles as well as dissertations as having a colon. Maybe it is a secret, but you want a title that lets the reader know where you're going. So now that we have a foundation, we've got a title. What else is in the outline? Well, let's go to the chapters of a dissertation. If you're looking for feedback on your dissertation outline before submitting it to your chair and your committee, you can join our free dissertation help group. Get advice from people who've chaired hundreds of dissertations. Be part of a community that's supportive. Just click the link below in your outline. And in the dissertation journey, the first thing we're going to accomplish is our proposal. And the proposal is typically the first three chapters of of a dissertation. Chapter one Think of as an introduction. You're going to provide a background to your study. You're going to have a problem statement. Here's what we don't know. You're going to have a purpose statement. You're going to have research questions. There's going to be a conceptual or theoretical framework section, usually brief. Something about the nature of the study is another heading we normally find here. Key terms are going to be defined and what's sometimes there, sometimes not. There is limitations and delimitations as a section and finally a summary of what you're talking about in chapter one, but also a segue into chapter two. Chapter two is your literature review. Typically you're going to have a brief introduction. You may have your problem statement and or research questions again along with the purpose. What follows in many schools is a description of your literature search, the strategy you went through through the key terms, things like that, followed by a more in depth exploration of your conceptual or theoretical framework. And then typically the remainder of chapter two is the literature that supports the study you want to do. So there'll be headings and subheadings justifying perhaps variables you want to use, finding gaps in the literature and eventually, as in just about every chapter, there's a summary and then a segue into the next chapter, which is chapter three, which is your methodology. In your methodology, you're definitely going to restate your problem and your purpose. Now, I want to say restate. That means cut and copy. Exactly. I actually reviewed a document today where the research questions were different everywhere they were put in the document. And that gives questions to the committees. Oh, you're not doing this, or were you going that way? So you want to make sure that if you have a research question or a problem or a purpose that's been accepted by your committee, then everywhere you do it, you're using the same words every time. The next thing you want to do is describe your research design. Is it going to be quantitative? Is it going to be qualitative? And why is the approach you're taking the best approach to answer the questions you're asking in your dissertation? You want to tell your committee about your population and your sampling. Who is involved? How are you going to get them? If you're using any instruments that have been validated, what are they? How will they be used? What is the data analysis plan? Once you get data, what are you going to do with it? How are you going to analyze it? If you're not putting limitations in chapter one, then maybe assumptions and scope and limitations are in chapter three. It's a good idea to understand what your rubric is so you put things in the right place. I have seen too many times where they get comments from committee members saying, yeah, this is interesting, but move it to chapter two. That's where it belongs. So you're just going to save time, because every time you submit something for review, it can take a week, two weeks, three weeks, or longer, just for the turnaround. And if the only thing they're looking for is to you to move things to a different place, you've just wasted a considerable amount of time, possibly just by not knowing where they're supposed to be. If there are any ethical considerations, this is where to put them for your study, that you're going to be going for IRB approval, things like that. And finally, a summary and a transition to chapter four. You can think of the first three chapters as the contract that you have with your committee. After that, it's fun. You're doing what you wanted to do in the study and you have approval to do so. So once you've collected your data, now you're on to chapters four and five, results and interpretations. What does it mean? Things like that are chapter five. So in chapter four you're going to start, yes, you're going to repeat your research questions again so that they understand exactly again what you were looking at. Now I'm going to talk about the process of what I did. Chapter three says what I'm going to do. Chapter four says what I did, how I collected the data, how I, for example, if it was interviews, how I recorded the data, how I transcribed it, all of which you said you were going to do in chapter three. Chapter four you say, and this is how it worked because our plans in chapter three sometimes work out a little different. Well, I wanted 172 respondents and after X months of trying, I only got 148. And with committee's approval, I moved forward. So what you actually did comes up in chapter four along with the results. I did this test, I did this analysis, I did regression, I did thematic analysis. And now here are the results, whether it's in paragraph form and or table form, your presenting to the reader and telling the reader, here is what I found. If it's a qualitative study, you're probably adding quotes from participants in a quantitative study and to an extent in a qualitative study you're going to have charts and tables and things like that to support and show the significance levels or the numbers of respondents, demographics, things like that. In my opinion, chapter four is once you've done the analysis, chapter four is one of the easiest to write in that you're reporting what you found, reporting what you did. You end with a summary and yes, a transition into chapter five. Chapter five is where you get to say, hey, here are the research questions again, if you want to put them in there, and here's what I found and here's what it means, here's how it integrates into the previous literature. And this is the one point that I find the most neglected in chapter five is not tying what you found in with the work that others have done in the past. It shows where your research fits in the journey towards knowledge in your field. In addition to tying it in, you're going to talk about the implications of what you've done. You can talk about future research, what else should be done. You can talk about the limitations of what you've done. And if you put that before the future research, that then gives you logical spots to say, okay, I did this and I collected it from this type of people. But if we really want to generate more knowledge, we should go to a different population or a different technique. Of reviewing it or doing this study. So your potential future research is great right towards the end of your document. And again, you're going to finish with some sort of summary, but in this case no transition because there's nowhere else to go other than to walk across stage. Once we've completed the document, I'm going to go back through and check for alignment and flow. And one of the big things you want to check for is almost every university I've ever dealt with says you write the first three chapters in the future tense because you haven't done the research yet, but when you finish, you go back and rewrite, change to the past tense because now I have done the research. So you want to check for that. You want to check to make sure every time you put in your research problems, it's the same as when you first listed them. Same with your problem and your purpose. I said you want to tie your research back into the previous literature. Also just make sure you've answered the problem you said you were looking at. A number of times I've seen people get results, but their research questions weren't quite aligned or perfectly with their problem. And they've got answers to questions they didn't ask. Maybe so understanding this at the beginning is going to help you out avoid a lot of things in the past. Because what you don't want is your committee to come back and say, well, you didn't answer that. You know, you might want to go redo your study and that is just not fun. Ultimately, what I want to say is a clear outline gives you the path to graduation, and that's what we want. If you want help with your dissertation outline, join our free dissertation Help community. You'll get our five step dissertation acceptance framework, real support from veteran dissertation committee members, access to our free community, and a free one on one call to help you finish faster. You don't have to do it alone. Just click the link below to join thousands of people who have entered the dissertation acceptance program and completed their journey. I'll see you inside.