Ross Woods, rev. 2018, '20-'24
The first stage of a thesis or dissertation is the preparation of a proposal, which is essentially a request for permission to go ahead on a proposed topic. Put most simply, proposals really answer only a few questions:
Unfortunately, many students don't actually know the answers to these questions, even when they think they do.
The next step is to look another set of questions:
This is what you promise to do. However, don’t over-promise. If you think that you can do more but are not sure, don’t put it here. It is better to promise less and do more.
Whatever the level of the degree, and whatever form proposals take, they all have the following characteristics:
Although they all have the same purpose of gaining approval, the specific rules vary greatly from one institution to another as to length and contents. Other than that, you should check your institutions' rules, ask advisory staff, and ask other students to see their proposals. For example, in some institutions, students use the proposal to recruit supervisors so the cover does not say to whom it is submitted.
After that, you need to present a compelling case for your research. It is not enough to be good and to meet all criteria; it needs to be good enough for the gatekeepers to get entheusiastic about your research.
A proposal is like an agreement with your institution that if you do this, you will get a degree. However, an accepted proposal does not imply that the final thesis or dissertation will be passed. A proposal might be acceptable, but the dissertation might have weaknesses that result in not passing. Moreover, in a few cases, student's projects can face an unforeseeable change of direction, such as a methodology that gives unexpected or spurious results, or further research that forces a radical re-formulation of the research problem.
The simplest proposals are just long letters or filled-out sections in an application form, or separate documents of only a couple of pages each. They might also be called statements of intent.
They typically state the topic or problem, its background, its scope or limitations, the significance of the research or project (expressed in terms of need, relevance, or potential implications), and an indication of methodology. They are often too short to include anything but a very brief literature review. To further define the topic, a basic proposal might also include:
Full proposals might also include:
Programs with very large research components often require two stages. During the first stage, the student writes a short document called a prospectus, which is a proposal of ten to fifteen pages and has a bibliography. It must present some serious, focused reading and thinking. An advisor will work with the student to refine the topic so that it is ready to be submitted, but the final document might also be integral to establishing a supervisory committee.
During the second stage, the student writes a full proposal with much more detail. It is usually submitted well into the research process, and, although it will be revised later on, it is the first version of the introduction, the literature review, and most of the methodology chapter.
Ask your committee if you can submit drafts of introduction, literature review, and methodology as you go instead of waiting until you complete all three. It's easier all round; the committee has less to go through, you might get more focussed advice, and you can write the next item while waiting for feedback. However, even if your committee approves all three chapters separately, they might still want you to submit them together to check that they are consistent as one document.
Construct validity is the idea that the data collection methods must result in a data set that suits the research problem. For example, you will be in trouble if the proposed research method won't give you the data to help answer your research question. (Some instructors also call this alignment.)
The results of good alignment are that the collected data is all useful and no data is unnecessary. It is not as easy as it sounds, and is one of the most common problems for novice researchers.
In fact, all these elements must fit together and line up perfectly:
Specific statement of the research problem
(in one sentence)
↓
Specific statement of the research question
(in one sentence)
↓
Purpose statement
(in one sentence)
↓
The central hypothesis (if you use one)
↓
Proposed title
(in wording almost exactly the same as the research problem)
↓
Methodology
(The data collection methods and tools, and the data analysis plan)
↓
Data
↓
Data analysis
↓
Results
↓
Discussion
↓
Conclusion
Researchers can also include other items that must be consistent with other parts of the reserch process, for example:
A simple, neat, consistent progression appears quite elegant and gives supervisors little opportunity to complain. For example:
It is easy to express examples differently:
Some of these elements are easy to check. The statements of the specific research problem and the research question, the purpose statement, and the proposed title are all brief, and mostly in one sentence. They should closely resemble each other and use the same or similar language. It makes the statement simple, elegant, and easy to write.
However, if something doesn’t quite fit, your supervisor will probably suspect it even if he/she can’t put a finger on exactly what is wrong. It will be your job to find out what is wrong and make corrections.
Assumptions and circular logic can cause problems:
Garbage in, garbage out.)
assumptionsare magically transformed into
conclusions.)
Ask other kinds of questions, for example:
Check for other kinds of problems. For example:
In some programs, students must pass an interview with a supervisor in order to progress. The content is the same as a short proposal below. In fact, you might still be asked to write a short proposal.
The short proposal in some institutions is called a prospectus. The reasons for starting with a short proposal are:
A short proposal usually has a limit of 10 pages or 3000 words. The typing and layout need to be perfect and should follow the style guide. Even so, expect to be asked rewrite it multiple times to get it just right.
Most students have difficulty refining their topic and it is much better to make adjustments at this stage than later.
This outline is fairly common:
A pitch once meant a sales pitch, that is, a short speech that a salesmen used for selling, and you can be expected to give a pitch on your research topic to an audience. The strict limit of three minutes will force you to be very clear and focussed on what you want to do. You will have to omit any unnecessary detail and use plain language. Try this outline:
Then answer any questions from the audience.
Just state the topic in plain, factual, objective language. The title must be a phrase, not a sentence, and must reflect the topic of the paper. It needs to sound like a research report, and readers need to be able to identify easily the central theme from the title alone. When people read dissertation titles (often in a list of titles) they want to know quickly and easily what it's about.
Length can be difficult. Some institutions impose strict length limits and give students no choice. Otherwise, ten words is a good limit; your title should not be so long that it is unwieldy. If it is longer than about ten words, give a brief main title and put any necessary detail in a subtitle. The title can be more to the point to identify the topic, and the subtitle can include other necessary details.
Do not try anything creative and do not use a question. Resist the temptation to make a big impression with something that sounds glitzy, cute, or eye-catching. (It will just make you look foolish and immature.)
The problem is what is being solved in your research. Give your reason for selecting this particular topic, describing it as a problem that has not yet been solved. This is often a broad problem, that is, a problem that has not been narrowed down to a topic specific enough for a single research paper. Support your statement with references to the current literature showing that the topic is significant. This might not always be possible, but it is very helpful for opening your introduction and for your statement of significance. Some thesis guides also specify a separate section in the introduction of explanation of the problem (permasalahan).
In theoretical research, the problem must relate to academic theory. In professional research, the problem may be applied, but there must still be a theoretical aspect.
As a general rule, do not choose a practical problem that does not involve theory. For example, it usually should not be answered with practical guidelines in the form of implementation steps, or topics that are not relevant in the world of research.
The research problem did not magically appear out of nowhere. Describe the background of the topic, usually as a fairly brief explanation of its historical development or its particular context. Either way, it must make the topic easy to understand for those with no specialist knowledge. If you can tell the story well, your subsequent work becomes more credible.
Many research problems have a history, and it is often good practice to recount any historical developments that resulted in the current state of affairs. For example, researchers might have debated the issue in different ways. Consequently, it is helpful to describe that debate, along with any major documents, researchers or institutions.
You might need to give some context. If you are studying a particular institution or community, give a description. For example, if it is a school, you would describe its social, cultural and demographic context. In other cases, the research problem might have a particular legal context.
In cases where context is particulary significant, the introduction might include a relatively brief background statement, and then a later chapter is devoted to exploring it more fully. This is the case when readers cannot be expected to know anything specific about the context.
Otherwise, get to the point. According to Μαrtιn J Ριtt, many students go a long way back and give lots of information that is well-known, or could be given in only a sentence or two, or is not directly relevant to the dissertation. Getting to the point might also save lots of work; imagine having to delete 50 pages of information that is not directly useful to the dissertation.
You need to answer the questions, So what?
and Who cares?
If it's not important and compelling for any reason, why would you bother writing it and why would anyone bother reading it?
Write a statement defining the significance of your project. In research dissertations, significance must normally be given as theoretical value, such as implications for changes in theory. Many institutions also require a statement of possible practical effects or benefits, especially improvement of professional practice.
Include a statement of your research purpose. If your problem is broad, your purpose will state what you will specifically try to achieve in a single work of research. It need not be long but it must be direct enough to clearly communicate your intentions to your readers. As a rule of thumb, try to express the core purpose in about 10-15 words. (Any longer might meant that you haven't focussed it well enough.)
Express the topic as one question that has not been answered or an hypothesis to be tested. Again, keep to a limit of about 10-15 words. (Any longer might meant that you haven't focussed it well enough.) It must be direct enough to clearly communicate your intentions to your readers.
You might also list sub-questions or sub-hyptheses if you wish, but they must be aspects of components of your main question or hypothesis.
Describe the findings or outcomes that you expect from your project. Don't promise too much or too little. Your report should be suitable for inclusion in your proposal, and, ultimately, in the introductory chapter of your dissertation.
As Βαrbαrα Rοbsοn says, Make it easy for your examiners to work out what your contribution is … do make it very easy to see why you chose the problem, what your hypotheses were, the line of the argument to your conclusion, and what you have done that is new.
The danger is circular logic that creates a bias; if you start by assuming that something is true, then your research will also conclude that it is true. In other words:
(With thanks to Βαrbαrα Rοbsοn and Dανid Tγlεr.)
Many topics are clearly enough defined using the above descriptors.
However, some topics need a statement of scope. You might need to clarify some borderlines, mentioning specific aspects and giving your reasons why they are included in or excluded from your topic. For example:
Some delimitations might arise only later during the research, in which case they can be inserted in the introduction during the final re-write.
Some students find it difficult to explain research gaps because, by definition, nothing has been written directly on their specific topic. The way to do it is to describe the related research and mention how it leaves a gap, for example:
Research on differentiated instruction has shown a significant relationship with the quality of student learning. However, almost all of these studies were conducted in western countries, with only Bharat (2007), Goh (2011) and Lee (2013) conducted in Asian contexts and none in Indonesia. In Sihombing's survey, he found that Indonesian education faculties rarely teach it and students do not practice it. Consequently, a critical question arises: do Indonesian teachers know how to implement differentiated instruction in the classroom? In other words, do they have sufficient knowledge of the principles of differentiated instruction and the appropriate skills for implementation? Research on differentiated instruction in non-western contexts and, especially, the Indonesian context, is still lacking. Consequently, this gap justifies the need for further study.
All serious research programs require students to present an explicit theoretical basis for their research. Specific practices, however, vary between universities, disciplines, and perhaps even between supervisors. Some don't treat it as a separate stage. Some differentiate between theoretical framework
and conceptual framework
in various ways, but they are perhaps as much a matter of style and preference as of substance. It was once usually called “theoretical assumptions.” I prefer this way to look at it as it is less confining and allows some eclecticism.
Research normally builds on the research that has gone before it, so researchers normally need to work within an existing theory or set of assumptions and to extend research within them.
Whatever the case, you need to define the theoretical basis of your approach to your topic by defining theories, assumptions, concepts, and models relevant to your research topic. Evaluate your assumptions; you might even find situations where it is helpful to challenge some of them. If you are dealing with models, you should compare similar or related models. Depending on the situation, you might need to combine, contrast, or modify them.
Your annotated bibliography must be exhaustive on the elements of your conceptual framework. Here is a simple approach, which differs little from the normal treatment of sources:
I'd add a few of my own caveats:
When the annotated bibliography is done, present the framework as a concise model.
Based on "Theoretical/conceptual framework: The lens of the DBA doctoral study" by Walden University. Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-01xVTIVC8&t=93s
Many kinds of research require human subjects, and you need to define them clearly and accurately.
The particular group of people whom you will research are known as a population
or sometimes as the target group or target population. (As we already saw, defining the population is a significant way to narrow your topic.) At this stage, you need to define its characteristics so that you know from whom you will gather information and to whom your conclusions will refer.
This involves setting eligibility criteria to fit with your study objectives. Sometimes, they will be defined by ethnic, social, or cultural factors, or by being related to a kind of program or organization. In other kinds of study, they will be defined by academic results, by general health, by age, or gender. For example, you can use demographic descriptors (e.g. children from thirteen to sixteen years of age living in Longbridge County), or professional descriptors (civil engineers who worked on the Flatridge construction project, kindergarten teachers in public kindergartens in Smithville County). However you define them, it needs to fit your research purpose.
Explain why you chose that target population. What characteristics does it have that are suitable for addressing your research problem? Why is is a better choice than other possible alternatives?
The principle is that you need enough to support your conclusions.
In qualitative research, choosing between more or fewer people will depends to some extent on what you want to learn. Fewer people are less representative of the whole population but give more opportunity to explore individual characteristics. More people are more representative of the whole population but give less opportunity to explore individual characteristics in greater detail.
Fortunately, you can have it both ways by getting small amounts of data from many people (e.g. with a written questionnaire), and large amounts of data from relatively few, carefully selected people (e.g. with focussed interviews).
If you use interviews, you can identify saturation as you go based on a set of criteria. Data saturation
is the point when further data-gathering does not uncover any new information, enough data has been collected to draw conclusions and the data adequately represents the population. So far, there is no reliable way of predicting saturation points. The best way so far is three consecutive interviews in which no new themes emerge and you have enough data on every theme that emerged.
At doctoral level, it is sometimes recommended that students compare several populations to create greater generalizability. In other words, your conclusions will be representative of a wider total population. For example:
Consider these other examples:
Comparison is easier in quantitative research, because you are simply comparing statistics using known methods. However, in qualitative resesarch, you will need to explain the comparison in considerable detail and give concrete examples of similarities and differences.
A researcher needs permission from an organization if he/she wants to use it to recruit research participants from their constituents. Consequently you should select populations for which permission is feasible. Some reasons are as follows:
Can I set a particular number of participants?
A student asked: How can I predict how much data I'll need at the planning stage? I'd like to set a particular number of participants. What would be a good justification for using a particular number?
In answer, this is what to do when planning your research:
There are different possible reasons why you might need to define some terms in a thesis or dissertation, for example:
In any of these cases, you need need to give a definition so that your readers know precisely what you mean when you use the term. In a few cases, you might need to argue your case.
On the other side, some students feel that they must give a list of definitions because that what's written in the textbook. Consequently, they unnecessarily define common words that don't need definitions. Omit ordinary, unambiguous words that are used with their normal dictionary meaning.
💡 Hint If a term is used with different meanings in the research literature, you might need to discuss it in the literature review.
This section of a full proposal is really the first version of the final introduction chapter.
Later on, unless you made maor changes to your topic, you will simply edit the proposal and make any necessary changes. The main change is that you might add assumptions, delineations, or definitions that arose during your research.
Literature reviews are usually an early part of a research document, such as a dissertation, thesis, or article for a research journal.
The literature review has two main purposes. First, it gives an up to date picture of current research and thinking relevant to your topic and a fair evaluation of the main ideas. This helps to ensure that your research builds on current research and that your research does not unnecessarily repeat work that has already been done. Second, it should justify your core research question and any sub-questions you have. All relevant aspects of the research question should normally appear in the literature review.
Don't treat it as an unhelpful, onerous chore. First, ask questions and look for answers in order to learn something new about your topic. You might even change your views completely. Second, careful treatment of the details is part of being thorough; learning to do so is part of the degree requirements. Third, the better you perceive the current state of knowledge on the topic, the better your research can be.
The literature review represents the current state of knowledge on the topic. It benefits you in many other ways:
Literature reviews also have another benefit for the beginning researcher. They show that the writer can learn a new topic by oneself with minimal help or supervision.
(By the way, literature reviews are also good assignments by themselves. If you have been given the task of writing a literature review as an undergraduate essay, it will most likely be specified as an essay of between 1,500 words and 2,500 words, but the number of items probably won’t be specified.)
Find three or four dissertations on topics similar to yours. The literature reviews are easy to find because they are put in a separate chapter in most dissertations. (Look near the front; it's usually about chapter 2 or 3.) Many journal articles also contain literature reviews.
perfect. They are finished products, and you won't immediately see how they were written.
Different kinds of sources have different levels of value in research:
There are two main kinds of journals:
Journal articles are often relatively short, and they can be quite recent because they take less time to be published than books. The best journals are all referreed, that is, independent reviewers have approved them before publication.
One kind of article is the research article, which are usually from 4,000-6,000 words and are narrowly focussed on a particular topic. They usually have very specialized relevance, so many articles in the same field will not be relevant to your particular research topic. The other kind of article is the book review; reviewers write short articles reviewing new books published in the specialized field of the journal.
For serious research, especially at doctoral level, it should include mainly doctoral dissertations and peer-reviewed journal articles published in the last three to five years. Some monographs are significant enough to be essential, even if they are older. Masters theses are permitted, but most of them are not as useful.
Besides journal articles, you can use many other kinds of sources. You can use books that are primary or secondary sources (called monographs). They are seldom completely up to date because they take so long to get to print but their thought is normally very well developed. In the same way, you can also use chapters of large books, anthology articles, and (sometimes) Internet sources. In most cases, you’ll be looking at the works of individuals, but you can also study leading figures and major movements in the field. Unpublished sources are also permissible.
You don't need to include only include original research items. You can also include critiques of research because they contribute to the current state of knowledge on the topic.
While many of your sources will be books and journal articles, you can also use chapters of large books, anthology articles, dissertations, and Internet sources. (Try to use a range of sources, and not just the Internet.) In most cases, you’ll be looking at the works of individuals, but you can also study leading figures and major movements in the field.
Your literature review should normally include the theory and concepts behind the topic, including critiques. It should also include empirical literature. This is research done in the real (or simulated) world that has produced concrete evidence related to the topic. 2
After that, supervisors have different views, such as:
But there is no literature on my topic
What if you do not find any literature on your topic? In a very few cases, nothing has ever been published that is clearly and directly relevant to your topic. Usually, however, much more has been published than students think, and their main difficulties are finding it and seeing how it is relevant.
In these cases, the best practice is usually to review the literature in the next door
subjects, that is, those closely related to the topic that do not impinge upon it. The point of the review is to argue that nothing or very little has been written directly on the topic, usually called a gap in the literature
. What little there is should be closely examined. I call this Long Bridge
strategy for literature reviews. Your task is to build a long bridge between indirectly relevant literature and the topic. Perhaps you feel that are in a unique situation or your topic seems so creative and new.
Consider three kinds of cases:
An early stage in almost all research projects is to do your reading and keep a set of useful notes on what you read.
Writing a long literature review is much easier and less overwhelming when you have a good method. It reduces some complicated tasks to simpler steps, so that you can put your effort into the tasks that require more thought. Instead of immediately trying to write a literature review, it is a much easier to write an annotated bibliography first as a separate stage.
An annotated bibliography is simply a set of organized notes from a reading project on a particular topic or issue with your evaluation of each source. It is then put into a form that others can read:
Your annotated bibliography should show the role and effects of recent research in the field. It is a way of getting ahead start by learning as much as you can from what has already been written. That way, your research project will build on the work of others rather than repeat it. This also gives a firm theoretical basis for your research.
There is no specific rule about how long (or how many words) a literature review must be in a dissertation, because the criteria is really its thoroughness in dealing with the topic. A short review might be adequate for some topics, while a very long review might be inadequate for other topics. However, as a guess at what you might expect, the literature review in a Masters thesis of 20,000 might be about 5,000 words, and it is often from 30 to 50 pages for a PhD. Journal article have strict word limits, so writers can select a limited number of only the most significant and relevant items.
“How many items should be in the annotated bibliography?” All PhD programs have the same answer: “You need to be exhaustive; the search is is not complete until all relevant documents have been reviewed.” However, different institutions and departments have different definitions of “exhaustive.” For example, one answer is to stop looking only when there isn't anything left to find.
Look at the page on doing an internet search. However, for a literature review, you probably won't do a general search of the internet, because you want to do most of your search in several databases of research articles, for example, Google Scholar and Core.
Look at the page on doing an internet search. However, for a literature review, do most of your search in several databases of research articles, for example, Google Scholar and Core. (A general search of the internet will gather lots of non-research materials of little value.)
When you get a relevant and helpful paper:
Write a brief introduction explaining your purpose. This will most likely be to explore a topic or issue of some kind and say why it is important. You might need to specify the boundaries of the topic. One or two paragraphs is usually enough for an essay.
As an annotated bibliography, the body of your text is the full biblographical details of each source, followed by your comments on each one.
It is adequate to put your items in alphabetical order of the authors last names, just like a normal bibliography. If it helps you to better organize your notes, you can arrange them under section headings for each topic, with the entries under each topic in alphabetical order.
At the end, write a conclusion so your readers know what you concluded. You should mention general patterns, trends, or themes that you can see in the literature. Present your conclusions in an advanced a state as you can justify from the literature. The conclusion should show that you have achieved the purpose that you stated in the introduction.
A book review is a short article that tells readers about a book and gives a fair evaluation of its main ideas. Most academic and professional journals contain reviews of new books that may interest their readers. The purpose is usually to update readers on new ideas in their field. Authors often submit books in the hope of a favorable review, so that they will sell more (Lecturers sometimes ask students to write them to assess their understanding of particular books.)
A book review normally has the following parts:
Another way of expressing this is the MEAL Plan, which can be a helpful way to construct paragraphs when writing literature reviews:
The MEAL plan is helpful but might not always be appropriate. For example, if several articles say almost the same thing, it might be better to report and comment on them together.
Adapted from Wαlden Acαdemic Guides Link, which adapted it from Duke University's Thοmpsοn Writing Prοogrαm (n.d.) "Paragraphing: The MEAL plan." Link
Then type it up for presentation according to your institution's style guide. Check the layout and proofread your typing, grammar, and language style.
___________
1. Based on “Working Backwards: Moving Past Brain Freeze and Writing Your Problem Statement.” Moliver, Nina. (Unpublished paper.)
2. With thanks to Bαrbαrα Pαvεy.
For more information:
The annotations
are your comments on sources relating to your topic. For each source, briefly report the main points or ideas, because you cannot presume that your readers can already know that information. Then say why it’s relevant, important, and unique. Make sure you include in-text references to every source you use so that you don’t plagiarise anything.
Consider anything that would affect your interpretation. Did the author have a particular purpose for writing? Or a particular audience? Did the source have a particular background that you need to tell your readers about? For example, if an author wrote about a particular country, is he/she a local person or a vistor? If the person is a visitor, how long did they live there? Did they work in the field they are describing? (If the author was a military veteran writing about a battle, you might interpret what they say quite differently from a young armchair amateur, or a prominent academic writing on the same topic.)
Write a critique. Be polite; this does not necessarily mean find fault
because you might find that the source is excellent. Use the same kinds of expressions that you’d have others use to critique you, as long as you are direct enough for your readers to get your point. (A few students are so polite that they don't make their points clearly.)
💡 Hint. Read through the whole journal article, including checking the data. Some authors slant their analyses and findings to find what they wanted to find. Others are more tact than fact; they aim to suit funders, current paradigms, or institutional wishes.
💡 Hint. If you have access only to the abstract, you may include it but perhaps only as a Cf. also ...
or See also ...
comment.
Your main goal is to find information that is directly relevant to your specific research topic, especially research findings and conclusions. You can also look for:
how toinformation that might inform or justify your own methodology later on, along with supporting references. (Methodologies are usually spelled out in enough detail for someone else to copy them.)
If you have already written an annotated bibliography, converting it to a literature review is mainly a fairly simple editing task, although it still requires some serious thought
You need to develop an outline and decide on section headings that will make sense to your readers. Annotated bibliographies normally put items in the alphabetical order of authors, which is not very helpful for a literature review.
You now have an annotated bibliography that might look like a chaotic mix of different ideas. You now need to turn into a literature review. Your goal is to put the contents into a neat, easy-to-understand order, in language that flows. You want your readers to be able to enjoy reading something that is informative and flows well but still accurately represents the contents.
In essense, you need to group the same ideas together under the main ideas, so that each main idea will become a major section in the outline. Then you need to create outlines for each major section.
To create an outline, find a specific method that works for you. The method you choose is irrelevant as long as it results in an outline that makes sense for your topic and to your readers:
At least one outline will emerge, even if you don't see it at first; you might even have multiple options from which to choose. Besides, you can change it later on if you come to a better understanding of your topic.
If you did not find any literature on your topic, see the footnote.*
Strategy 1: History of ideas
Tell the story. The easiest and most logical literature review to read is a history of main ideas, showing how they follow along in sequence and to some extent flow from one to another. The historical approach allows you to trace the origins and development of major ideas, and indicate the false starts and the unexpected insights. This kind of review picks up on trends, assumptions, and watersheds. Watch for developments that happened simultaneously; they tend to mess up the simple linear structure. Be careful not to miss out major developments that are outside your normal field of reading.
Strategy 2: Author by author
A common approach is to consider the works of major writers one by one. This is useful when their specific ideas are directly relevant to your topic, their works are watersheds, or when writers don't fit into categories very neatly.
Strategy 3: Shape of the literature
Discuss the areas in which literature has been written, and when trends dictated that much would be written and when little or nothing would be written. The library stacks will give a rough idea, although familiarity with issues and major writers is necessary to do a good review. It includes mention of especially significant writings that spurred a great deal of other literature to be written. The great strength of this approach is that you can mention whole bodies of literature, describe their general characteristics and assumptions, and give specific examples. This is very appropriate when the literature is massive and the whole is more important than individual parts. (Don't be caught out; there are times when you need to treat each author as having unique ideas that must be addressed individually.)
Strategy 4: Integration
You might be reviewing very different sources from different schools of thought, but you are showing that they are all saying the similar things, are based on similar assumptions, or responding to similar kinds of problems. Your task it then to pull them together into one coherent, overarching theory.
Strategy 5: Spaghetti
Perhaps the most difficult is the case in which a great deal has been written directly upon the topic. You feel like you are finding a path through a tightly knit pile of spaghetti. The way to do it is to divide the literature into groupings according to history, assumptions, or methodology. You can then use the body of literature
approach.
Can I combine these different kinds of literature review?
Yes. In fact, most literature reviews need to do so.
You might find that new topics emerge and you need to improve the outline to cope with the new topics. Don't be afraid to make the changes even if they are radical. Although perhaps frustrating for you, it is a sign of progress because you have learned something new.
Here's why. Creating and modifying an outline is itself an analytical process; you identify which ideas are the most important and which are the subordinate or peripheral. The challenge is to present them in an order that helps your readers.
You will probably go through several drafts of your outline before it is ready to show your supervisor. When you think it is ready, present it to your supervisor as a one-page list of section headings and subheadings to ask for advice and to approve your direction. Later on, you might change the outline and some of those headings as you revise successive drafts. Just check that the changes are improvements and that your supervisor agrees.
Then, do some editing:
💡 Hint: You can do this by simply moving text around in a word processor document, and long as you save new work as a new file and keep the older versions as backups.
Make sure that you give enough information for your readers to understand your writing. Your readers probably will not have prior knowledge of everything you know about the topic, so you need to give enough detail to prevent gaps.
The preliminary literature review will be included in your proposal, and, ultimately, will be the basis of the literature review in the final dissertation.
To start this stage, your first objective is to decide on one or more particular methodologies suited to your topic.
The research problem should drive the research, not the methodology. The truism for people with only one research method is that: If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.
But if you should choose from a variety of tools, you can select the right one for the job.
💡 Tips
If you collect data in the field, it might be preferable to use at least two different methods. For example, the results of one method may be used to confirm the results of another method (called triangulation). Alternatively, you might use one method to get small amounts of data from a large sample of subjects, and another method to get detailed data from a small sample. Consider these ways of usiing multiple methods:
Mixed methods.
In brief, you have two kinds of mixed method
options. In the first, use a qualitative method first to find and explore dynamics, then use a quantitative method to confirm their occurance is the wider population. In the second, use a quantitative method to establish a set of phenomena, then use a qualitative method to explore the reasons for that phenonema.
Triangulation.
This is the collection of different kinds of data and then comparing them. It has three main purposes:
It need not be difficult. Consider, for example, these different methods: document review, observations, interviews, focus groups, and surveys.
The data sets might converge if they give the same or very consistent results, but comparison does not always simply confirm your data. They might complement each other, perhaps by adding explanations for phenomena. For example, a survey might get feedback from a large population, while interviews and focus groups tend to explore causes and perceptions. Alternatively, the data sets might lead to very different conclusions, and you should explore the reasons for the divergence. This can be very illuminating and rewarding, so do not consider it an error if they are inconsistent.
1 Triangulation
, Andrea J. Nightingale, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography Second ed., 2020. See also Triangulation,
A. Nightingale, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009.
Your chosen methodology might be quite suitable for your purposes, but is inappropriate in particular circumstances or if used in particular ways. You can strengthen your statement of appropriate usage by clarifying its limitations.
In some circumstances, your supervisor might ask you to write a critical review of your methodology, for example:
old-fashioned.
In these cases, it is much better to prevent any problem at this stage than to face awkward questions later on.
💡 Hint. This kind of critical review might make an excellent journal article.
If you will develop your own new tools, you will need a procedure for writing and testing them.
Students normally write their own questionnaires, because questions need to be focused according to the particular research problem. Then, as part of the methodology, students must pilot and refine them.
Some kinds of questionnaires require complex quantitative validations and have rigid rules for collecting and analyzing data. In these cases, writing and validating the questionnaire might be the whole dissertation. If you need this kind of questionnaire, then you should find one that already exists, although some of them are tightly controlled, licenced, and available only for a fee.
Your supervisor might permit you to get questions (or whole questionnaires) from published dissertations as long as you reference the source and don't breach copyright. In some cases, your supervisor might require you to ask permission of the original writer. In this case, you already have evidence that the questionniare is valid and reliable.
You may use assistants for routine work as long as you take full responsibility for them. If you use assistants, be sure to describe in detail the training and supervision you give them and accountability arrangements in sufficient detail for another person to replicate them. This description probably goes best either in the methodology chapter or (if it is long and complex) in an appendix. For ethical reasons, recognize the intellectual contributions made by assistants, either as references or in the preface, depending on the kind of contribution they make.
Your statement of methods should also include a plan for your data analysis. This will vary in complexity according to your method. For example, the interpretation of statistical data needs a clear procedure and might take considerable explanation to demonstrate validity. In contrast, qualitative ethnographic studies usually require relatively little explanation of a data analysis method.
The market currently has many different software packages for analyzing qualitative data. Working with large amounts of text or multimedia data, they can classify, sort and arrange it, and then examine relationships within it. You are not required to use software, and hand-coding might not be any more difficult. If you use software, choose a package that is be easy enough to learn and is suited your particular purpose. Compare the packages. Some are free, and might be as good as proprietary software. Some packages are perhaps not as good. See the wikipedia article.
Some universities allow students to subcontract a data analyst or statitician as long as students describe the details in their methodology. (It's like using research assistants.) It has pros and contras. It might be faster and, for some people, necessary to finish. However, it might be very expensive, and it's best if you know how the analysis works and can do it yourself.
The coding process is the interpretation of raw data so that it is in a form that is useful for reaching a conclusion. If you are coding data manually, you might need to have someone else check the coding to increase its objectivity and reliability.
How will you select people? Will you research everybody in the population, a core group, a random sample, a purposive sample (group carefully selected to represent everybody in the community), or a snowball sample? In fact, some research guides include many other kinds of sampling techniques.
At doctoral level, your total population might be very large, for example, a whole state school system. You might decide to have several populations and compare them. In this case, you would choose a sample of schools, and in each one a sample of students. This would produce a data set that would better represent the whole state, rather than using only one school. (See stratified sampling and cluster sampling below.)
If you want to research everybody in the population you will need to use either a set of statistics, such as whole-of-instititution statistics (which may be quite unreliable or need very careful interpretation), or have a small enough population that you can conduct your own kind of census of everybody, tailored specifically for your needs.
You might have a population size as small as one, for example, a biography or a unique case.
Mathematitions have developed various formulae for determining a sample size that fully represents the whole population, called a statistically representative random sample. Your supervisor might view it as the gold standard
for quantitative methods. You can use an automated system from the internet as long as you reference it correctly.
However, it is not always that easy. It requires that you know the size of the population and who is in it to be able to calculate the sample size. Then, the size of the sample might be too big to be useful in practical research.
A smaller random sample to some extent still represents the whole population, because every member of the population has an equal chance of being selected.
A core group
means the group of people who are either the key decision-makers, the influencers, or the gatekeepers of its knowledge. Ethnographers often deliberately seek out these people.
To create a purposive sample
(also called a controlled sample
) is to define a population according to specific criteria relevant to the topic (e.g. demography, occupation, specific experiences) and carefully select a group to represent everybody in the community. It might be more or less random, depending on how the you recruit respondents:
You must give compelling evidence for the selection criteria. For example, choose group members carefully so that the group has the same balance for gender, class, employment, age group, etc. as the general population. If it is big enough it should start to lessen the role of individual characteristics. Its advantage is that it represents the population but allows a smaller number than would be required for a random sample.
A theoretical sample
is to use an intial purposeful sample, analyze thematic categories in the data to find emerging theory, and then add more repondents to the sample to test the validity of the theory and explore relationships between catagories. (Ref.)
An accidental sample
is to select subjects or cases based on convenience or on their availability. It really only means “the group of people who were easy to recruit.” It is difficult to claim that it is representative, but might be the only available method in some circumstances. This is sometimes called an opportunistic sample
, or a sample of convenience.
It has several particular uses. First, it is a good option for early trials of procedures. In this case, the representativeness of a sample doesn't matter so much as long as the feedback is helpful in improving the procedure. Second, like snowball sampling below, it might be the best way to recruit people in a particular circumstance, where other methods are not practical or might distort findings. In qualitative studies, you must carefully qualify your conclusions so that they are still valid.
Otherwise, a convenience sample is not useful for quantitative studies where a random sample is required. It is also not recommended if a researcher is using it only as a “lazy person's option” and another kind of sample would be better.
A snowball sample
(sometimes called a networked sample
) works well when groups of people are very secretive. It is a network of friends, relatives, and acquaintances, where one contact will lead to others. With this approach, you can easily get more people by having those you know introduce you to their friends and relatives. Because they are socially connected, you can only claim that the research accurately represents your sample—they cannot be considered fully representative of everybody else in the population. However, the aspect of trust can make the information more reliable, and the ability to access more informants through networks makes it easier to contact people.
Stratified sampling
and cluster sampling
are different methods of random sampling when a population comprises different groups (i.e. sub-populations). However, different sources use different (and conflicting) definitions so check them first, and choose the one that will work best for your topic.
In many countries, any institution that conducts research must have a specialist committee for research ethics; in the US, the committee is often called the Institutional Review Board
(IRB). Researchers must write an application for ethical approval before commencing research. The application is a separate document and must contain an ethical compliance strategy. It is assessed by the ethics committee, and you may not commence resarch until the IRB has approved your ethics proposal.
Some requirements vary according to the particular context, and you might need to have ethical reasons to support your proposed methodology.
No ethical guideline can be comprehensive enough to cover all disciplines and all circumstances, so students need to examine the particular circumstances of their proposed research. Different fields of study have different ethical guidelines, and students should also look for information in professional standards, dissertations on similar topics or done in similar situations, and other published research.
Some projects are classified as practicum and not research because they do not aim to create new, generalizable knowldege. In this case, your supervisor might not require an ethical proposal at all. Otherwise, ethical compliance has different levels:
In some cases, the IRB can expedite (speed up) the approval process, while in others, it must go through a full review process.
If you will collect information on individual human subjects, you will need to address a specific set of guidelines. Proposals must include as a minimum:
In any research that involves human or animal subjects, students must do a risk analysis:
Your report should be suitable for inclusion in your proposal, and, ultimately, in the methodology chapter of your dissertation. Your readers need to know that your research was ethical, especially anybody attempting to replicate your research.
A methodology plan can be quite involved, and you need to be able to answer these questions:
The methodology plan is much the same as the final methodology chapter. Later on, you simply edit the methodology plan to reflect what actually happened. The main differences between the plan and the chapter are:
With thanks to Τεrry Ηαmmιlτοn.
Your committee can require you to submit a written observation protocol that outlines the items to be observed during every observation. You might also need a system for keeping field notes about what's being observed and the context.
The structure will depend on your study topic, problem statement, and research questions, and whether it is quantitative or qualitative. The field note structure is usually more forgiving and "general."
Use your research methodology textbooks and the research from your literature reviews to justify your protocols, and for examples of what they might look like. Some people even write to authors to ask for examples if they aren't included in, or can't be inferred from, their research articles.
Keep your research books close by to:
Your research books can be especially helpful when the committee doesn’t agree or pushes for another direction.
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⚠ Warning: Make sure that any list of things to look for does not blind you to alternative data. Doing so would compromise your conclusions.
Evaluate what you anticipate to be feasible as early as possible. Check if the study concept and methodologies are practicable and executable given your restrictions in time, money, and people. This helps to determine the study plan's real-world feasibility, allowing you to eliminate unrealistic options in the planning stage and make any appropriate revisions and refinements.
Draw up a budget if your research incurs expenditure. Some researches have no financial outlay, while others might have substantial costs. A budget will be also be useful in your methodology chapter, and might be used for funding approvals.
If you plan to use research assistants, draw up a plan for recruiting and training them. This will also be useful in your methodology chapter.
List any permissions that you will need. For example, if you are doing research inside an organization you will normally need permission. With your supervisor's approval, get any necessary permissions. They will be necessary for your proposal to be acceptable.
Plan your goals and make a schedule for each of the steps. If you don't already have a deadline, make yourself one. The recommendations below give percentages of the total time for each stage:
In most institutions, it is unrealistic to complete a doctoral dissertation in only one year. However, if you wanted to finish a small project in a twelve-month period starting in August and finishing in May, here are some possible deadlines:
⚠ When you set your schedule, consider the consequences of going over time limits:
If you have followed this process so far, you should have all elements below. Assemble them to make a full first draft of your proposal. Although outlines and contents vary a little, it is fairly normal for a major proposal:
Then edit it all into one harmonious document. Put transitions between sections and paragraphs and check the layout so that it reads easily.
Polish your proposal ready to submit for approval. Edit it carefully, including all details of spelling, grammar, punctuation, language style, and layout. Check that you have accurately defined any specific terminology and concepts that would otherwise be ambiguous. Run it through a spell-checker and a grammar checker. Check the logic so that it all hangs together well.
When you submit your proposal, allow committee members at least a week to read it and get any ethical approvals.
Some institutions also require students to give an oral presentation as well as their written proposal. It will probably only last about thirty minutes, and the committee may ask questions.
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