The Dissertation Chapter 1 Framework That Prevents Endless Revisions

Well, welcome everybody to today's live session with Beyond Ph.D. Coaching. And for those of you who don't know me, I'm Steve Tippins. Today I wanted to talk about questions that we get about Chapter 1 of a dissertation. And this is all going to be based on the assumption we are dealing with the typical 5-chapter dissertation where Chapter 1 becomes your introduction. If you are at a school that provides a template for what they want in their dissertation, this can be extremely helpful because it will give you headings like Chapter 1 is your introduction. We need an introduction. We need the problem statement, the purpose, maybe the background of the literature, maybe a few other things in there. Including limitations, delimitations, and it depends on the school. But having that outline can really eliminate a lot of uncertainty about where to start, and it's something you wanna pay close attention to. If you don't have the outline, because the outline does provide like, here's the required steps you need to do. If you don't have an outline or a template or a rubric some schools may call it. Then we've got to come up with another idea, another way, formatting. One of the easiest ways to come up with at least an example of a format or formatting is to go to your library, online, physically, however you get to your library, and ask your librarian for a copy of the most recent dissertation that your chair has accepted. And what this will do, not only a completed dissertation, but it'll let you see what types of things your chair has approved to be in Chapter 1, as well as the rest of the dissertation. And this can give you some comfort, some certainty about moving forward with your document. Now, whether your school has a prospectus or not, Chapter 1 is the beginning. It is, like I said, the introduction, and it pretty much lays out Chapters 1 through 3. 2 and 3 are bigger expansions of it, but within Chapter 1, you're going to have normally something like background of the study, which will be a short, maybe 4 pages, literature review. It's also going to be a brief methodology. This will be a quantitative study or or this will be a qualitative study, a very brief explanation that you go further into in chapters 2 and 3. So that introduction is basically, you want to think of it like that, the old, how do you do a speech? Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. Well, this is, think of it as the tell them what you're going to tell them section. It's here's what's coming. I'll develop more later, but here's what's coming. The concept of alignment, where your problem statement, your purpose, your research questions, and your title all go in the same direction. Very important, especially in Chapter 1, because this is where it's presented. This is where people get to determine whether your material's in alignment or not. So you want to have a problem statement that's from the literature. You want to have a purpose that supports using similar words, because one of the problems with alignment is we use different words sometimes, and every time I use a different word in what seemingly says the same thing can bring about different interpretations, which then means you're not in alignment. So this is a key component. The title also has to be part of this. So you want to make sure your title represents what's coming in your document, what supports your problem, your purpose, and your research questions. So this alignment comes front and center in Chapter 1. Some people say, "Look, I got a problem, but I don't know if I'm phrasing it properly." Your problem statement, again, evolves from the literature. What don't we know? And sometimes an easy way is if somebody in the literature says, "Hey, here's what needs to be studied." But the problem to be studied, it becomes one sentence. It's surrounded many times within a paragraph or a couple of paragraphs, but the problem statement itself is pretty straightforward, and it then becomes the basis for the purpose. So if the problem statement said, the problem is that we do not know the lived experience of teachers, elementary school teachers, and student learning through COVID close down. Well, then the purpose could be, the purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study is to explore the lived experience of elementary school teachers and student learning during COVID Something like that. So very similar wording gives me a sound foundation for alignment. You want to have this fairly focused. If it's broad, if it's generic, your problem statement, your purpose, and everything else, if it's broad, we don't really know what you're doing. I've read a number of dissertations where they state the problem and I don't know what's going on. And then in the purpose, they kind of explain what they're doing, but that needs to be supported in the problem as well. So So sometimes we say things that are broad or generic because we don't really know where we're going. So we figure we'll just put it out there broadly and maybe they'll let it slide. Committee's not going to let it slide. You want to be specific. Another reason you want to be specific is when it comes to later down the line in the study, am I matching what my problem is? Am I finding information about my problem? If the problem is broad, then the information has— can be all over the place and hard to do. If the problem is specific and narrow, then I can collect data to get to that problem. If the problem is specific and narrow, I can have research questions, a research or multiple research questions that are specific, and I can answer, and they can get me to my problem. So it's worth spending some time on your problem statement and setup so that you can later on have a study you can do. One thing I see every once in a while is people who start writing their Chapter 1, and they start writing in the past tense. This study did, this study found. The tradition is you write your Chapter 1 and 2 and 3 in the future tense at the proposal stage because technically you have not completed the study, which means after you complete the study, you have to go back and change this to past tense. And just to let you know, it is a lot easier now with word processing than those people who completed their dissertation 50 years ago or so. They have to retype every page. You just have to go in and change the tense on some verbs. So it does, it is a little easier, but the tradition is write in the future tense until you finished and then put it in the past tense. Now I also understand the argument of, well, this is chapters 1, 2, and 3, and no one's going to see it. Other than the committee until it's finished. So what does it matter if I write it in the future tense or the past tense? It's just not going to see the light of day for people outside of the committee. And that's true, but we follow the tradition. I've only worked with one client over the last 8 years or so whose school said you can write this in the past tense. Everybody else follows the norm of writing things in the future tense. And then going back and changing them. So Chapter 1, it's really worth spending the time to set up your foundation, to set it up properly, to understand what your school's requirements are, because moving forward from there, it makes everything much easier. So if you've included what's needed, if you've included what's wanted, because a lot of time, or in some cases. Your school will have requirements, and your committee may want some extra requirements. So this is why we submit them to the chair and committee before approval and see if they want more of a certain area or specific coverage of certain things. And every once in a while, you'll write something out and they say, oh no, that should go in Chapter 2, so you cut and paste. Ultimately though, you're going to find out what your committee's looking for, you're going to then be able to provide it to them. And providing it to them in a format that they want, answering questions that they want, allows them to approve and you to move forward. Because really, that's our goal, is to have you move forward. It's also a good time in Chapter 1, assuming you're starting with Chapter 1, to become familiar with style. Many dissertations use APA style. There are other styles out there based on discipline that are used. You want to know which style your committee, your school requires. And I've found over time there are schools that say, well, we follow APA, and then they have modified it slightly for their school. So not just knowing APA is great, but if your school has modified it in some way, You need to know what their modifications are so that, you know, you can move forward. They will accept and pass what you've done. Now, question that came up for me earlier today: in writing Chapter 1 and all through your dissertation, what's the impact or what should I think about anthropomorphism? And anthropomorphism is when we assign human characteristics to things that aren't human. "my cat looks to be very depressed." Well, people can get depressed. I don't know if we know cats can get depressed. Or "this study will explore." Well, only people can explore. Studies can't explore things. Anthropomorphism as an issue in academic writing was a very big issue 10 to 15 years ago. There was a crackdown from a lot of schools about, "Ooh, watch out for anthropomorphism." With the latest versions of the APA manual, and over time, some schools have loosened a little on anthropomorphism. And so, but you want to make sure you're attributing things to people and not to objects that can't explore or can't feel in the human sense of feeling. Just watch out for anthropomorphism. Some faculty members, committee members are going to be very diligent when it comes to anthropomorphism. Others are less diligent. So the earlier you get in the habit of first understanding what they want, but second, providing them what they want, the easier this process is going to be. And I have forgotten to mention, if you're out there watching this live, please jump in at any time with questions. I'm out here and excited to talk to you. In summary, Chapter 1 is the introduction. It is the beginning. Some committee chairs want you to write Chapter 2 first because it's the exploration of the literature, but the document itself, Chapter 1, is the introduction. So you want to be setting this up in the proper formatting. And by formatting, we also include spacing. We also include font. That some schools have limits on fonts and on the size of the print. One of the errors I see pretty frequently is you indent. In APA, you indent the first line of every paragraph, and then people will go along doing that, doing that, doing that, and then there'll be 3 paragraphs in a row that aren't indented. And this is simple to correct, but it's just a matter of probably cutting and pasting and not paying attention to detail. But it's our introduction. We want to set it up with the problem the purpose and the research questions that all align with the title and every other section that your university and committee are looking for in order to approve this and move you forward.