Writing The Winning Thesis Or Dissertation: A Step-by-step Guide

The stated purpose or aim of this book is to ‘demystify the writing of theses…[and provide] an experience-based, practical work that takes [students] through the process one step at a time’ (p xi). As such, the book is divided into five parts; establishing the foundations of a master’s or doctoral research project; developing a research proposal and mounting an initial defence of it; researching and writing the thesis or dissertation; defending and profiting from the dissertation; and solving the problems which may occur during the dissertation process.

Each part contains a number of chapters dealing with relevant topics; so, for example, researching and writing the dissertation includes chapters on discussions of the research design, mastering academic style, organising the dissertation, writing the introduction, writing a literature review, explaining the methodology, presenting the results, summarising and discussing them, and preparing for a thesis defence.

The individual chapters are tightly focused and offer guidance and advice to research students based upon a distillation of the considerable experience of the co-authors.

Is this, then, the book to recommend to your new research students? The answer is probably not, for four main reasons. Firstly, the book is written entirely about research degrees in the US and quite a lot of the material is simply not applicable in the UK context. Secondly, the book is almost entirely about research degrees in education and educational psychology, and it has little to say about the (very different) approaches involved in other disciplines. Thirdly, and oddly for a book intended for budding researchers, it takes virtually no reference to the extensive research literature on the research student learning experience (see for example Golde 2000, Lovitts 2001, 2005, Neumann 2003, Gold and Dore 2004, Ahern and Manathunga 2004). In fact there are very few references at all, and only one to work published in the present century. Fourthly, the book is up against some stiff competition, including Cryer (2000), Wisker (2001), Greenfield (ed.) 2002, Dunleavy 2003, Finn (2005), and the revised fourth edition of Phillips and Pugh’s (2005) classic ‘How to get a PhD’. All of these are oriented towards UK-style research degrees, take a broader approach in terms of disciplines, refer in varying degrees to the research literature, and in most respects are more up to date.

But that is not to say that the book has nothing to offer at all to UK research students. In particular, there is one chapter which they may find helpful, Chapter 24 entitled ‘Solving Problems with the Committee’. The latter, of course, is the advisory committee which US universities have been using for forty years or so to supervise doctoral candidates, and the chapter is about managing the problems which can occur under joint supervision.

Until recently, this might have been of little interest in the UK where, at least in the older universities, the single supervisor model has for long been dominant. Now, however, at the insistence of research sponsors, joint supervision has been defined as the norm in the apparent belief that it is can overcome issues inherent in relying upon a single supervisor. However, this chapter is a helpful reminder from US experience that a move to multiple supervisors is not necessarily an unmixed blessing and can bring with it a potential for conflict within and between members of the supervisory team and the student which can rebound to the grave disadvantage of the latter.

In all then, there are more appropriate guides which can be recommended for UK research students, particularly outside the education and educational psychology fields, but it would certainly do no harm for students, and for that matter their supervisors, to read the chapter on the problems of co-supervision and how to go about resolving them.

References:

Ahern, K. and Manathunga, C. (2004) Clutch-Starting Stalled Research Students. Innovative Higher Education, 28(4): 237-54.

Cryer, P. (2000) The Research Student's Guide to Success. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Dunleavy, P. (2003) Authoring a PhD. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Finn, J. (2005) Getting a PhD. London, Routledge.

Golde, C. (2000). 'Should I Stay or Should I go?' Student Descriptions of the Doctoral Attrition Process. The Review of Higher Education, 23(2): 199-227.

Golde, C. M. and Dore, R.M. (2004) The Survey of Doctoral Education and Career Preparation: The Importance of Disciplinary Contexts. In D.H.Wulff and A.E.Austin (eds.) Path to the Professoriate: Strategies for Enriching the Preparation of Future Faculty. San Franciso, Josey-Bass.

Greenfield, T (2002) (ed.) Research Methods for Postgraduates. London, Arnold.

Lovitts, B.E. (2001) Leaving the Ivory Tower. London, Rowman and Littlefield.

Lovitts, B.E. (2005) Being a good course taker is not enough: a theoretical perspective on the transition to independent research. Studies in Higher Education, 30 (2): 137-54

Neumann, R.(2003) The Doctoral Education Experience: Diversity and complexity. Australian Government, Department of Education, Science and Training. Canberra. Accessed 3rd August 2006

Phillips, E. and Pugh, D. (2005) How to get a PhD. 4th Ed. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Wisker, G. (2001) The Postgraduate Research Handbook. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.