Читать книгу Qualitative Dissertation Methodology - Nathan Durdella - Страница 45

Up to this point, I have explored with you keys to successful completion of a qualitative dissertation methodology and specific guidelines in selecting a dissertation chair that support your methodological decisions and the negotiation of the details of research design and methods in your dissertation study. Through these discussions, I have articulated an explicit, albeit shallow, definition of the dissertation. Here, I discuss with you the elephant in the room: the cultural foundations of socially reproduced and reified notions of dissertation research and culturally produced artifacts of dissertation studies. Sorting out the multiple and competing meanings of what we mean by dissertation research and working toward a more complex understanding of dissertation work may help.

What do we mean by “dissertation”? What is a “dissertation,” and what do students produce in the dissertation research process? Conventionally, we mean the following:

 a book-length study or an original research study;

 a contribution to scholarly research and practice;

 a study deposited in a library and accessible in an online repository of similar publications;

 the first among multiple studies in the lives of scholars and academic types;

 a series of steps to follow and structure to use in a process that includes working to the expectations of an advisor and faculty members of a committee who assess work on the study;

 a signature program requirement for doctoral degrees and a culminating experience of a doctoral program of study leading to a terminal degree;

 an opportunity to work closely and collaborate with a scholar or leading expert in the field and a way to be identified with such a line of inquiry for future job prospects;

 a process through which students struggle and many students do not succeed, serving as a stumbling block and obstacle to program completion and perpetual all but dissertated (ABD) status—more on this outcome below; and

 a mechanism that faculty use to screen suitable colleagues for the academy—sort of as a rite of initiation into academic life.

As you can see, there is quite a dizzying array of ways to describe dissertations and a broad range of meaning in what we ascribe to dissertations. When we turn to specific events in the dissertation research process, we find just as many included terms. For example, with the “dissertation proposal” cover term, we frequently find the following definitions:

 the first three chapters of the dissertation or the introduction, literature review, and methodology chapters on a dissertation study;

 the starting point of a dissertation study in which research topic, problem, purpose, and questions are on display and subject to scrutiny of your advisor and committee;

 a challenging set of activities that forces students to consult the empirical and conceptual literature to situate their original study in the broader trends in the field;

 a program requirement that occurs after the qualifying exams and before institutional review board (IRB) protocol approval and data collection fieldwork;

 a point of program departure for many students—an event in a proposal hearing and a product in a proposal that tend to serve as a point of stop-out for doctoral students who move into ABD status;

 a set of conceptualization and design activities where your advisor expects to review and offer feedback on drafts and where committee members share comments ahead of or at the proposal hearing.

Do you see where this is going? The use of the terms dissertation and dissertation proposal forces us to unpack a lot of cultural meaning in our work. We could go on—how about dissertation defense? Just the cover term defense alone is loaded with meaning. What comes to mind for you when you think of defense?

As historically and socially constructed, dissertation research can be seen as a process grounded in cultural rituals of disciplinary, institutional, and departmental groups. These groups, historically comprised of faculty in colleges and universities in the United States and Europe and now constituted of faculty from around the world, operate within disciplinary associations, academic programs, and institutional structures that tend to inform what counts as scholarship and how systematic investigations—original research—can be carried out. Over time, beliefs about topical areas of interest, paradigmatic lenses, research designs, data collection and data analysis procedures, and interpretive approaches informed standards in the field and conventions of practice. These beliefs reflect deeply rooted value systems about what members of the academy see in their world: their ways of seeing (ontology), ways of knowing (epistemology), and ways of investigating (methodology). Add to their academic belief systems what they expect in terms of work products—research and book manuscripts, scholarly presentations, and more recently extramural funding—and you can see how academic groups reify cultural meaning in what they do and make as academics.

Socializing Into an Academic Field

As a graduate student, how you do learn doctoral dissertation rituals in your program? From program entry to degree completion, Baird (1995) suggests three stages of graduate student socialization. At each stage, students require unique—even if overlapping—guidance. Baird’s (pp. 26–28) suggestions for what students need—and what faculty advisors need to provide to students—are instructive. In the beginning stage, students need to

 understand the structure of the field,

 become acquainted with the language and approach of the field,

 become acquainted with the people and emphases of the program,

 find a group of peers,

 find an appropriate faculty sponsor,

 obtain sufficient financial assistance, and

 deal with the specifics of program and university requirements.

In the final two stages, the middle and dissertation stages, Baird offers faculty advisors and students a more intense set of suggestions that relate to degree program completion, advanced career preparation, and dissertation development. Here, Baird (pp. 28–30) argues that students need to

 master the language and approach of the field,

 identify intellectual and professional interests,

 choose a committee,

 prepare for comprehensive examinations,

 develop the idea and methods for the dissertation,

 seek advice and guidance from a faculty advisor, and

 find encouragement from a faculty advisor.

The behavior, language, and products of faculty at doctoral universities and master’s and baccalaureate universities favor dissertation research in various, sometimes diverging forms. Traditionally, the dissertation has taken the form of a book-length monograph—although length in a final dissertation is not a measure of how credible or valuable a study is. Informed by historical patterns of research productivity in the German research universities (Malone, 1981), faculty values related to how to socialize new members to the academy as research scientists framed approaches to dissertation research in Ph.D. programs in U.S. colleges and universities. Returning to the same two program handbooks mentioned earlier in Chapter 2 of this book, we see explicit cultural uses of dissertations as research artifacts of doctoral students. University of California, Los Angeles’s (UCLA) Department of Education handbook for the Department of Education in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (GSEIS) says this about the dissertation associated with its Ph.D. degree program (2010, p. 5): “The dissertation . . . must embody the results of the student’s independent investigation, must contribute to the body of theoretical knowledge in education, and must draw on interrelations of education and the cognate discipline(s).” The Rutgers University Ph.D. program in criminal justice articulates a similar approach (p. 13): The doctorate requires . . . original research in the form of a doctoral dissertation. The dissertation is an investigation of a problem of significance that makes a unique contribution to the field. It must demonstrate that the candidate is capable of independent research and analysis, reported in accepted scholarly style, and that s/he has attained a high degree of scholarly competence” (Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, 2015). Even with these approaches to dissertation research codified in program structures—more conventional in nature—disciplinary groups and subgroups shape the organization and content of dissertation research through cultural meaning and interpretations.

Of course, the academy is not a single entity or monolithic group but comprised of many smaller, highly specialized groups of disciplinary members (Becher & Trowler, 2001), and these discrete groups tend to adapt approaches to meet the needs of their specific systems of values, beliefs, and traditions. In academic work and life, no single group generally maintains complete cultural hegemony over all others. Instead, academic groups and subgroups tend to be influenced by their closest cultural identity reference groups and work to maintain their own unique expectations for doctoral student research. Here, academic and research specialization and turf (Damrosch, 1995) over specific areas of scholarship frequently drive outcomes in how faculty train doctoral students. For example, reflecting a more applied approach, the same UCLA department records this about the dissertation in its Ed.D. program (GSEIS, 2010, p. 9): “The dissertation . . . must embody the results of the student’s independent investigation and must contribute to professional knowledge in education and the improvement of school practice.” Similarly, the California State University, Northridge (2014) program handbook stipulates (p. 14) that “[a]ll candidates complete a dissertation based on a review of the literature and original research on a problem of practice related to educational leadership, student achievement, and school/community college improvement.” Clearly, a focus on practice in the field constitutes these programs’ dissertation research process—but key terms such as independence and originality of work retains the essence of a cultural identity as an activity of academic research. In the archived documents of all of these doctoral programs, the work products are clear: dissertations of original research that contribute to what we know and do in the field. In fact, you can see language native to the cultural roots of research faculty: independent investigation, theoretical and applied knowledge, and institutional or organizational improvement (e.g., schools or community colleges).

Among members of the academy, beliefs about knowledge and research work extend to members of different groups and to all types of scholarly contexts. In fact, in a postindustrial context, academic cultural groups have responded to changes in conditions in which they operate—competitive marketization, commercialization, massification, and globalization (Becher & Trowler, 2001). These broader dynamics have changed how academic groups think and behave—and what they produce in their knowledge work. While changes in academic groups and subgroups tend to be complex, standards for how to investigate and organize knowledge in the social and behavioral science research context have been documented. That is, steps to design, execute, and disseminate products of research work have been disseminated alongside changes in higher education institutions and markets. Between shifts in research paradigms, changes in research design and methods, and emerging technologies to collect, analyze, and interpret data, fundamental belief systems have reshaped behavioral forms in the research process—even while basic principles of systematic approaches to investigating human social life have remained the same. This is particularly evident in dissertation research.

With junior and senior members of the academic groups alike—from assistant and associate rank faculty in the tenure review process to the ranks of graduate students in terminal degree programs—reproducing conventional and emerging standards for research processes and outcomes, we can outline what tends to pass as research. If we look at the social and behavioral sciences—and trans- and interdisciplinary fields and applied fields that emerged from and remain connected to them—dynamic conventions of research govern what researchers do and produce. From faculty training graduate students to editorial boards of refereed journals to leadership of academic research associations, researchers abide by a general consensus of what constitutes sound designs and methods for carrying out systematic and rigorous investigations of social and behavioral phenomena. What comes to mind when you say “systematic and rigorous”? These research standards shape the general approaches to scholarly studies and inform the specific steps that researchers use to gather and interpret information in a study. And these standards dictate what you do as doctoral students in your dissertation research.