The Dissertation: From Beginning to End (Pocket Guide to Social Work Research Methods)
Peter Lyons
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: 019537391X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Many otherwise strong doctoral students get stuck at the dissertation stage, but this trusty guide takes students from the early planning phase to finishing the final draft. It contains straightforward advice for each stage of the dissertation process: selecting a chair, completing the literature review, developing a hypothesis, selecting a study sample and appropriate measures, managing and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data, establishing good writing habits, and overcoming obstacles to completing the dissertation on schedule.
Practical guidelines, tips and strategies, and action steps checklists in each chapter make this a handy pocket guide for students as well as advisors seeking a comprehensive, unintimidating road map to the social work dissertation.
lead from data to the discovery or development of theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Grounded theory is explicitly emergent; it does not seek to test hypotheses but rather to find what theory accounts for the research situation as it is. Grounded theory uses both inductive and deductive reasoning, the former in the process of generating theory from data and the latter in the process of constant comparison. The basic method of grounded theory is to read and reread a textual database and label
time and resources. The sample should therefore be representative of the population from which it is drawn. As we shall see below, this is often best achieved by random sampling. Sampling Frame A sampling frame includes the list of potential units from which a specified number are drawn. The frame is typically some type of list including all, or at least most, of the units in the study population. For a researcher planning a national study of NASW members, a comprehensive NASW membership list
made and a set of tools and techniques that will help you acquire the skills and expertise necessary to propose, design, implement, and write your dissertation. DECISION ANALYSIS Decision analysis provides a theoretical framework for understanding the types of decision that must be made in completing a dissertation. It is a prescriptive approach to understanding, analyzing, and improving decision making, which provides a powerful heuristic device. The elements that constitute any decision,
file cabinets or their equivalent, and that electronic data are also kept in the virtual world version of a locked, steel cabinet, with appropriate limitations on access, firewall protection, and appropriate 137 138 The Dissertation encryption. It is also important that identifers are removed and stored separately from the data. Given the requirement to retain data, it is also important to ensure sustainable longevity for these arrangements. Your institution will have very clear minimum
epistemology and purpose—what might be described as aligning epistemology, data, and interpretive style (Padgett, 1998). A grounded study, for example, might emphasize the theoretical understandings derived from the data, with the data used to support the theory and also used to demonstrate the construction of the theory. In contrast, an ethnographic study may pay more attention to the ‘‘spatial and symbolic boundaries in which human events occur’’ (Sandelowski, 1998, p. 277), stressing