PhD candidates keep making this Chapter One mistake

Dr. Steve Tippins Ph.D. here, and welcome back to the channel where we come together to help you finally finish your dissertation and put those letters at the end of your name. Writing Chapter 1 is easier said than done. If you're a doctoral candidate embarking on your dissertation, you know how daunting it is to stare at that first blank page. You know that this is a critical moment. Chapter 1 is either going to move your dissertation forward or— it's going to come back to you covered in red. This is your committee's first impression of your research. What they see in Chapter 1 is going to determine whether they approve your work or send you back to square one. And I've seen it happen hundreds of times. Brilliant, hard-working candidates get derailed, not because they're not smart enough, but because nobody told them the rules. I'm Dr. Steve Tippins, Ph.D., and I've spent 35 years in academia. I've sat on more than 300 dissertation committees. I've seen the same Chapter 1 mistakes over and over again, and I don't want you making them. So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through the most common Chapter 1 mistakes that new doctoral candidates make, why they happen, and exactly what to do instead. Grab a notebook and let's get into it. So in Part 1, I'm gonna cover the don'ts, and these are the things that slow you down or even set you backwards. Don't go into your dissertation or Chapter 1 with a predetermined answer. Committee is going to shut that down immediately. Now, what that means is you write a document that says something like, "Well, I want to show that," or "I'm going to show that," meaning I know what the answer is. I know what the conclusion is, and I'm going to support or teach you all what the right thing is. Your committee's immediate answer is, "If you already know, there's no need to do the research." So, you want to have a question instead of something you know that you want to disseminate. Another way to say that is your dissertation is research or an investigation. It is not a platform for you to disseminate the knowledge you've accumulated even before you entered the dissertation. And it's not a way for you to tell the world the right way to do things. It's where we try to answer questions. The second thing I've seen in Chapter 1s is where people, what some would say, bury the problem statement. They basically imply what the problem is but don't come out and say it. You want to come out and say what the problem you're going to be studying is. That becomes the foundation for the rest of your study. So, So don't make your committee and other readers try to say, well, is this the problem? No. Well, maybe this is the problem they're looking at. No, no, I think I got it. This is the problem. You want to, at some point, and even explicitly, the problem to be studied is— lay things out directly for your committee. If your committee reads your chapter and says, okay, so what exactly is the problem? You've lost them., and you've lost the advantage of this reading and moving forward faster. Tell them the problem. And in fact, many templates at universities for dissertations have sections for the problem statement. Well, in the problem statement section, you better be saying what the problem to be studied is. The third thing is, look, chapter 1 is not a dumping ground for you to set forth everything that you know. It's an introduction to your study, introduction to your methodology, an introduction to your literature, presenting your problem, presenting your purpose and your research questions, and a few other things depending on your school get included in Chapter 1. But it's not where you go way deep into literature. I've seen comments over and over again, "Too much. Move this to Chapter 2. Too much." Move this to Chapter 2. Brief introduction to the literature. Catch the reader's attention, then go deeper later. Basically, what happens if you put too much in there and it comes back to you with a whole bunch of, this goes in Chapter 2, this goes in Chapter 3, what that means is you've wasted the time of a revision. And a revision can be 1 week, 2 weeks, 2 months, and you've lost that time because you didn't really know what should go into Chapter 1. The fourth thing, and this might be the most common area where people have problems with Chapter 1, and it's called alignment. And what that means is, do you have a problem statement? Great. Do you have a purpose? Great. Do you have research questions? Great. But even greater is, do they all say the same thing? Do they all use the same terms? Do they all go in the same direction? If they don't, it's out of alignment, and that'll get your document sent back to you right away. So you want to make sure that if you use terms in your problem statement, use the identical terms in your purpose. Don't say this is similar, because if it's similar, it doesn't mean it's identical, and that's going to bring up questions like, well, it's not always the case that this is this, so therefore you're not in alignment. One of the things I tell people frequently is you want to be boring. Don't try to make it interesting by changing the wording. If you've stated your problem every where you have a problem, state it the same. Same thing with a purpose. Same thing with research questions. And it's unfortunate, but one word can throw you off. And I've seen people change a word or two and then lose weeks and maybe even months by having to go back through the cycle again to change the word. So do it the first time. The fifth point is there is a template and sections in a template for every chapter, and that means They want them. If you think they're redundant, don't leave them out. Let your committee tell you if they want it taken out. You don't make those decisions. Now, there is a caveat to that. Sometimes there is a template that says, if you're doing a qualitative study, use this section. If you're doing a quantitative section— study, use this other section. Yes, don't use the qualitative section if you're doing a quantitative section. But otherwise, if they ask for something, Give it to them. Let your committee say leave it out. But if you leave it out, your committee's most likely going to say, well, okay, but it's got to have this other section, the definitions or something like that. I want to see it again with the right stuff in it. So make sure that you put it in the first time and don't make just judgments on your own. Now that we've gone through what not to do, let's kind of wrap this all up by getting to what you should do. In Chapter 1, you should have a question that you don't know the answer to, and that question should be based in a gap in the literature. Not just a question you randomly decide you want to research, but a question that there's support for in the literature. That's going to get committee approval. Do not, as I said, make your committee work to try to figure out what your problem is. State it directly. Okay? It's a lot easier. Think of your committee members. They're reading this document, this long document. They may have other documents, they may have other duties. And if you then start making them work harder and harder to figure out what you're doing, they get less and less happy with you, and you want to keep them happy. So give them exactly what they're expecting. Chapter 1 is the introduction, the framing of what you want to do. The further explanations of the literature to support the gap of the methodology in depth are provided in later chapters, chapters 2 and 3 typically. Don't give everything in chapter 1. Chapter 1, again, it wets their appetite. It's an introduction. Keep it that way. I know I said this, and I'm going to say it again. When you have a problem and a purpose and a research question or questions, you're going to repeat them throughout your document. Cut and paste. Do not change the wording. I've seen too many times where committees or I have said, okay, here's your problem statement that you've— you're talking about in Chapter 3, but in Chapter 1 on page 6, you said it this way. Which one is it? Now, what that means, it took the time for me to get to your document. It took the time for me to read it. Now it goes back to you. You make the change, and then it comes back to me or your committee, and now it gets in the line of when to be at, and you've lost a great deal of time just by not doing something simple. If it's a research question, it's the same research question everywhere. Same thing with the problem. Same thing with the purpose. If you're at a university that has a template, use it and give your committee everything that's in the template. I have seen, again, way too many times, committee members write back saying, "Okay, but where is this section from the template?" Well, again, we've lost all the time getting in line to see them. Now the time for them to read it. Now sending it back to you. It's pretty simple. If there is a template, follow it. Give them exactly what they're looking for, or at least your best guess as to what should go in there. Because if I start with my best guess and they make comments, I can get it back. But if I don't have it and then I start with my best guess, it's— we've got multiple rounds of going back and forth. And our goal here is to help you finish fast. Faster. So use these tips to do that. So there it is. You now have the most common pitfalls people face in Chapter 1 and ways to avoid those pitfalls. And the real hard truth is these mistakes don't happen because people aren't intelligent enough. They happen because you don't know the rules. They've never been explained to you clearly. Most likely, your program handed you or told you to go find the template or the handbook or something, and that's it. And magically, you're supposed to figure it out from there. On top of that, many times when you do figure things out, you submit them to your committee and you get vague comments like, "Oh, not in alignment." Well, that doesn't help you if you don't understand what alignment is. And really, what you need is someone on the inside to help you decipher this and save time and move you forward much more quickly. That's exactly what we do at Beyond Ph.D. Coaching. If you're stuck anywhere in your dissertation or looking for a path to move forward much faster, join our free dissertation help community. Just click the link below.