How to Write a Qualitative Dissertation That Gets Approved

Today, what I really want to talk about is just getting into qualitative dissertations and a qualitative analysis. And I want to start by saying there really is no better approach, qualitative or quantitative. One is not just superior to the other. It all is based upon The research you're doing and the research questions you're asking. If your questions say something about perceptions or things like that, it's qualitative. If your perceptions talk about differences or significant changes, that's going to be quantitative. So, you know, that's a simple way to think about them, but ultimately the approach you take is dictated by your research questions. If you want to be able to answer your research questions, you have to have the right approach. So if your research question is something about what are the opinions or what are the perspectives or what are the experiences of, that's most likely going to be a qualitative approach to research. If someone comes to me and says, here's my research question and I'm doing qualitative, because I'm not good at math. Okay, but it better match their research question. You don't by default say, I'm doing quantitative because I like math, or I'm not doing quantitative because I don't like math, and therefore I'm going to fit it to everything. It works the other way around. You take the approach that's appropriate for what you're looking at, what you're exploring, what your research question is. So that's the first thing a committee is going to say. It's not the right approach. And if you can do this ahead of time, you've saved time. Because every time we can save an iteration back and forth with a committee, it can save 1, 2, 3, 4, or more weeks getting people to respond. It's also not uncommon for people to say, I'm doing qualitative because it's easier. It is not easier. There is no approach that's Easier. Okay, one of the questions I ask every doctoral student is access to data. Can you get access to people? And you may believe, oh yeah, I ought to be able to get access, sure, no problem. I've seen way too many people qualitatively and quantitatively run into issues. Oh, well, I'm not getting the data. What's going on here? I have problems. I can't finish. So be aware of this at the beginning of the process instead of when panic sets in after you've had 4 months of trying to collect data and you're only a third of the way there. That can be problematic. So definitely be thinking about that the most. And again, getting data isn't easier or better for either type of generic approach. I will say there are firms that are out there that will charge you money. But there are firms that are out there that will assist you in the data collection process. They may not be able to do it for every situation, but it might be something to explore. If you've run into roadblocks, just contact us and we can help you determine what firm might be beneficial for you to use. When doing qualitative research, I get questions like, okay, I've done my interviews, now what? Well, now you're going to transcribe those interviews and you can do it the traditional way by hand, which takes a long time. And by hand, I mean you're playing the recordings back to yourself and typing them into your computer and going back through them. And you know, it takes a while to do that, a long time to do it. Or there are companies out there. The one that comes to mind quickly, otter.ai. Transcribes, meaning they'll take the recording and turn it into a digital file, and it might take 5 minutes to do it. So that's a huge time saving, but it doesn't mean you're done. You still have to listen to see if it's done appropriately because we've got different dialects and accents and things like that, and it's hard sometimes for these automatic systems to get the right words in there, and you want the right words. Then you're going to be coding what types of terms come up, turning those codes, condensing them into themes. And many people have— at times you need an approach to do this, and Braun and Clarke have, I think it's 6 steps, that a lot of committees like people to use. It also gives you a foundation to rely on. Okay, Now I do this. But ultimately you come up with themes and those themes are used to go back and say, have I answered my research question? Wow, no themes came up to this question. Therefore, I can't answer it. Or these, this theme or these 2 themes allow me to address this question. So that's important for you to do is get through the process so that you have themes. Now there is software out there that will do this type of thing for you. NVivo, MAXQDA, Dedoose, D-E-D-O-O-S-E, and others that will turn a transcript into a theme. But you still have to be checking to make sure, because when you go to your defense, MAXQDA or NVivo are not going to be answering the questions. You are. So you have to be able to understand And explain things to your committee when and if they have questions. I've heard it said that people sometimes think they're writing their findings when they're writing interpretations. Chapter 4 of the traditional dissertation is, what did I find? Meaning, here are the themes. That's what I found. Here are the codes. Here I— they moved into themes. I found these X number of themes. Here are quotes from participants, anonymized participants. To support that. Chapter 5 is where you do interpretations. This is what it means. This is how it answers the research questions. This is what future research needs to be done. So you're not addressing that when you come up with your findings. That's reporting. Interpretation is, what does it mean? I hope that becomes helpful. And when you're dealing on your dissertation, one of the ultimate things is, you know, what is your committee going to say? And they're going to ask questions like, you know, the simple question is, how hard was it to come up with data? What processes did you use? How did you do your coding? Or how did you come up with your themes? What parameters did you use? I used Braun and Clarke's 6 steps, and I went— I go through the 6 steps and come up with answers that committees are usually happy with. It's when you don't have enough data. Well, I needed 10, but I only got 4. That's when you have to explain things to committee, and you can't just say, oh, I tried for a week and got 4. Typically, they want you to try for months before they'll allow you to report on data that is much lower than they initially accepted. But you ultimately, when you do a proposal, you have a framework which your committee has approved. Your Chapter 4 and 5 is filling it in. Don't give them more. Oh, I opened up this other area. That means a lot more questions come up. That means they get to go back to your proposal and ask, why didn't you update this? Why didn't you do that? You want to give them what that you've been approved to do and show that you have followed the steps that you outlined in chapter 3. This is where people may get in trouble is, I outlined the steps in chapter 3, every single one of them, so that my study could be replicated. And then in chapter 4, I didn't really say how I did it. Well, that's when committees are gonna say, well, you said you were gonna do this, show me how, tell me where. And that can slow you down. Just report what you did. If someone came to me today and we were on a conversation and said, oh, I'm gonna do a qualitative study, what do I do first? Well, first in all of this is come up with the problem and then your purpose and your research questions. But once you've gotten that far is, do you realistically have access To data would be the first thing I would look at, because I've just seen too many people over the years come back saying, I'm not getting data. I mean, I had someone contact me 6 months ago who had been looking for data in the plan that they had set up with their committee and was accepted. And they've been looking for 6 months, and they were supposed to get 8 participants. And after 6 months, they had 0 participants. And over that time, the committee said, yeah, you can do it with 6. Still, 0 of 8 or 0 of 6 is still 0. We had a discussion. We looked at a few things. And within a month, they had 4 respondents. They're in a very narrow field they're looking at. So coming up with participants is incredibly difficult to find them because the population is just small. Can you get access to data? Because if you can't get data, it just stops your study right there. And no matter what, I wish you luck in this process. If you do have questions, reach out to us at Beyond PhD Coaching. We'll gladly help.