Steve Tippins walks through the structure of a dissertation's Chapter 1, which should run about 15 pages and include an introduction, literature review, theoretical framework, problem statement, purpose statement, research questions, methodology preview, key term definitions, and ethics note. He emphasizes consistent terminology throughout and shows how each section connects to the next.
Congratulations, you've made it to the dissertation stage. You should be incredibly happy. However, entering chapter one might be a little daunting. So we're going to cover a broad overview of chapter one here in this video. The purpose of chapter one, Introduce the reader to what's coming. Some brief sections, maybe around 15 pages. That's going to give them the highlights of what's coming. Typically you start with an introduction. Now, schools are going to have different titles for these things in their templates, but you are incredibly intelligent. You can figure out how to translate this, what I'm going to cover into their titles. Introduction, probably a couple of citations. Hey, we're going to talk about educational policy or management handling of turnover, things like that. Next thing we're going to get to is the background of the problem. This I like to think of as a very short literature review showing the reader, yeah, there's some foundation for this out there. Follow that up by the theoretical or conceptual framework. Think of this as the seminal research upon which your study is based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Incredibly popular. Erikson in education systems theory is being used in many disciplines. Now. Follow that up by what many consider to be the guts or the foundation of the dissertation. And that's your problem statement. Your problem statement is typically one line. Now it might be surrounded by a paragraph or two, but the problem to be studied here is we don't know the impact of extra after school education on student grades in math, or we don't know, or we're not aware of the perceptions of employees, of management, changing retirement plans, things like that. Follow this up by your purpose statement. The purpose is directly related to the problem. So if we're looking at the problem being the impact of management decisions on employee turnover, then our purpose would be. Our purpose is to determine the impact of management decisions on employee turnover. Follow this by the research questions. Again, highly aligned with your problem and your purpose. So your research question could be what is the relationship between management decisions and employee turnover? Or what are the perceptions of parents regarding teacher pay raises? Any type of thing like that, which stays in alignment with your problem, your purpose and your research question. Quick pause. You're going to say things over and over and over again in your dissertation. Say them the exact same way you get in trouble when you try to get interesting and use different terms. Okay. It opens up whole new meanings. Now we're going to follow this with a really brief methodology section. Am I going to use a quantitative approach? Am I going to use a qualitative approach? Who am I going to use in this? Is it going to be secondary data? Am I going to interview parents quickly? Tell them that you're going to have a whole chapter, chapter three. To really go further on this, many chapter 1s include a definition of key terms. So if I'm talking about phenomenology, I better tell them what phenomenology is. If I'm talking about oh, special ed teachers, I'm going to say what a special ed teacher is. You also may have a section in chapter one on validity. This is going to be somewhere in your dissertation, but it's going to assure the reader that you're following all the ethical steps and that results can be transferable. Finally, you're going to have a conclusion wrapping everything up, letting the reader know what they saw, and a segue into chapter two. Now, what we do here at Beyond PhD Coaching is help you finish your doctorate and succeed in academia. So if you have any interest in following up further, go to our website, BeyondPhDCoaching.com book an appointment with one of our dissertation coaches or editors who are available. All of our dissertation coaches are dissertation chairs. They've got lots of experience. Hope to see you there and all. Best of luck on all what you're doing. Thank you.
