Dissertation

 What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to dissertation writing?” And one of the most frequent answers to this question is “piecing together” different parts of dissertation, organizing chapters, and combining different experiments in a logical way.

If you struggle with building logic and tying together different chapters or essays that your dissertation is comprised of, then you need to clarify your research goal and your message.

How do you do that?

Well, let me ask you: what is your main research question? What kind of problem are you trying to solve with your dissertation? What is your major “why”?

Start with the issue or problem that naturally leads to a need for research. Why does this specific study need to be conducted? What contribution will your dissertation make to resolving this issue? Who will benefit from your study and in what way?

This could be a real-life problem, a deficiency in literature on your topic, or a need to explore a certain topic more in depth.

Then, once you define your research problem, you will want to formulate the purpose of your study.

Being clear on one major issue that you are trying to solve and on the objective that you are willing to reach, will help you organize your dissertation around this central axis and pull its different parts together.

I’ll give you two examples:

1. From political science
2. From mechanical engineering (in my next email).

And if you are not a political scientist or a mechanical engineer, neither am I. But keep reading, because you will see how the authors of the two studies I’m about to discuss managed to make their research captivating and accessible to wider audiences, and how you can do that too. These academic authors figured out how to tie everything together in one powerful conceptual knot, which allowed them to capture their readers’ attention from the start.

My first example is an excellent book by Barbara Walter (professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego) “Committing to Peace: The Successful Settlement of Civil Wars.” The book, first published twenty years ago, was based on Barbara Walter’s PhD dissertation, and it’s a really fine example of academic prose. If you are in the social sciences, I highly recommend that you check out this book to see how the author builds her argument and organizes the entire book structure around her central concepts.

So how does Barbara Walter tie everything together? Here’s how.
The very first sentence of her Introduction (and her entire book) is her main research question: “Why do some civil wars end peacefully, while others are fought to the finish?” (followed by a few examples).

Then, on the very first page of the Introduction, the author states her argument:

“The biggest challenge facing civil war opponents at the negotiating table is not how to resolve disagreements over land reform, majority rule, etc. The greatest challenge is to design a treaty that convinces the combatants to shed their partisan armies and surrender conquered territory. When groups obtain third-party security guarantees for the treacherous demobilization period, - Walter argues, - they will implement their settlement.”

Implementation of the peaceful agreement is at the center of Barbara Walter’s theory of the successful settlement of civil wars. The most difficult “implementation phase” is key to understanding “why some civil wars end peacefully, while others are fought to the finish”. The puzzle, or the research problem she offers to solve is this: “Getting combatants to the bargaining table and resolving their grievances does not guarantee peace.” So why is signing a settlement not sufficient to end a civil war?

After years of research, Barbara Walter came to a conclusion that ending a civil war is impossible without third-party mediation that guarantees that the warring factions stick to their peaceful treaty instead of returning to war. Her three-phase theory is a significant theoretical contribution to research on civil war settlements.

Once the author has stated her argument, she defines her research objectives (underlining is mine):

“I have four aims in this book. The first is to uncover why so many civil wars fail to end in successfully negotiated settlements and why third-party enforcement or verification of the post-treaty implementation period is critical for success. The second is to reconceptualize the resolution of civil wars as a three-step process during which combatants must decide whether to (1) initiate negotiations, (2) compromise on goals and principles, and (3) implement the terms of a treaty. By understanding resolution as composed of three distinct stages, I hope to demonstrate that the factors held up in the scholarly literature to explain the settlement of civil wars omit a key problem. Groups who agree to meet at the negotiating table still worry that their enemy will take advantage of them… In the end, it is the implementation phase, long ignored by scholars, that is the most difficult to navigate and the reason so many negotiations fail. My final aim is to collect and analyze the data necessary to test a range of competing explanations in order to draw appropriate lessons.”

Do you see how the author lays out her theory, her discoveries, and her research logic in the very first pages of her book? This is really a masterclass in academic writing.

Important! Do you see how, in the paragraph quoted above, the author explains where the existing literature on her topic “omits a key problem”? That is why one of her aims in the book is to address this major flaw in the existing theories on the resolutions of civil wars: “In the end, it is the implementation phase, long ignored by scholars, that is the most difficult to navigate and the reason so many negotiations fail.”

This is what it means to find a “gap” in the existing literature on your topic. The “gap” in literature reveals a research problem.

Finally, I wanted to note that Barbara Walter’s book structure reflects the author's research objectives. There are three parts in it. Part 1: Theory; Part 2: Data and Quantitative Analysis; Part 3: Case Studies. But it's the Introduction, with the clearly stated research problem, theoretical framework, and the aims, that prepare her reader for the in-depth analysis that the author offers in her book.

There is a lot more to say on the way the author structures her book and on her methodology. But I will save this discussion for later. And I will end my long email here, with two action steps for you.

Action Step 1. Have you considered making your main research question an opening sentence of your dissertation? Why don’t you try it as an exercise?

Action Step 2. What is your dissertation title? Does it refer your readers to a problem that you are looking to solve in your study? If not, can you reformulate it in a way that it does?

WHAT IS A RESEARCH PROBLEM?

A research problem is a gap in the existing knowledge. You can also say that it's a disruption to the existing knowledge. It can be a missing part in our current understanding of the world, a discrepancy, that makes us doubt that our knowledge of a subject, or a phenomenon, is correct.
A research problem can be defined as an issue that exists in your field or in the literature on your topic. That’s why doing literature review helps you identify your research problem.
The existing issue and the consequences that may result from such incomplete or flawed knowledge, lead to a need for the study.
In your dissertation, you want to explain to your reader, why this gap in knowledge is significant and needs to be researched.

I know that examples are really helpful. So here it goes:

EXAMPLE 1. Authors of a 2001 study by Terenzini et al. titled "Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Classroom," identify their research problem as the struggle to increase the diversity of students and faculty in the American universities. While affirmative action has become the universities' policy-of-choice, there were court decisions that turned such policies aside. As the authors look for the ways to solve this problem, they point out the scarcity of information on the educational benefits of structural diversity on a campus. So the purpose of their study is to explore how students benefit from diversity in the classroom, because this is precisely the evidence the courts require if they are to support race-sensitive admissions policies.

In some fields, like genetics, biology, or astrophysics, research problems are widely known, so you just need to state it for everyone to understand its urgency.

EXAMPLE 2. A recent groundbreaking study by Rebecca Leane and Tracy Slatyer points to such well-known problem in astrophysics: "There has been an extensive debate in the literature over the origins of the Galactic Center Excess (GCE)," - they write.
(If you are not in physics, you may be wondering: what's GCE? - The GCE is excessive gamma-ray radiation in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is not well understood by scientists and has been a subject of ongoing scientific debates.)
The authors open their article by giving credit to the existing theory: "Statistical evidence has previously suggested that the GCE originates largely from point sources, and not from annihilating dark matter." Leane and Slatyer, however, dare to offer an alternative theory. Using "a proof-of-principle example with simulated data," they conclude that "dark matter may provide a dominant contribution to GCE after all."
Note the catchy title of Leane’s and Slatyer’s otherwise field-specific article: "Dark Matter Strikes Back at the Galactic Center."

Often, you come across a research problem when you discover new documents that help you better understand the origins of a historic event or a phenomenon, like, for instance, the invention of radio.

EXAMPLE 3. The study I’d like to discuss in more detail addresses the origins of radio broadcasting in America dating back to 1910s and 20s. Paradoxically, the publication’s main heroes are… the American Boy Scouts. What's the connection between the Boy Scouts and radio broadcasting, you may ask? Well, that’s the entire point of Noah Arceneaux’s study.
The author opens his article with a puzzle. Take a look at the first two paragraphs and see how he creates an intrigue:

"The image of a Boy Scout complete with kerchief and short pants, patiently tapping out Morse code on a radio transmitter may seem incongruous to some. After all, isn’t Scouting about young boys pitching tents and building campfires in the wilderness, activities that in the popular imagination represent the antithesis of cutting-edge technological practices?"
The first edition of the Boy Scout Handbook in 1910, however, taught boys how to transmit Morse code, and building a radio receiver was once deemed an obligatory Scout skill. In the early 1920s, when radio stations and transmitting towers sprouted across the United States, this same organization popularized the emerging technology, helping to bring the new medium of "broadcasting" into the American mainstream."

See what the author does here? He captures our attention by disrupting the common knowledge of the origins of the American broadcasting. He points out the incongruence of an image of a Boy Scout building an early radio transmitter, in the popular imagination. He shows a dissonance between the existing knowledge about early radio and the new information that he found. Such a dissonance leads to a research problem, which the author formulates in the following paragraph:

"Other radio historians have briefly mentioned Boy Scouts in relation to some other topic, though the radio-related activities of this organization have not been examined in detail. This research thus highlights a previously overlooked aspect of early radio, and in doing so, sheds light on the complex, multi-faceted process of social construction that ultimately produced the American system of radio broadcasting."

What Noah Arceneaux’s study does is it covers a significant gap in the existing knowledge of this early technological invention. It "highlights a previously overlooked aspect of early radio, and in doing so, sheds light on" how different forces in the American society: the military, the commercial structures, and the teenage boys, - came together to produce the system of radio broadcasting as we know it today.

Once the author has identified his research problem, it's easy for him to make his purpose statement:

"The purpose of this study, - he writes, - is to outline the promotion of wireless communication by the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) during the first decades of the 20th century, the period in which radio broadcasting developed and became an established technological and cultural practice."

I don’t know about you, but I find this study fascinating. I chose this example to show you how serious research can be intriguing and entertaining.

And I wanted to point out to you one other important thing.

Note how this author is keenly aware of his reader. Can you see, how the author carefully walks his reader through the intricacies and complexities of his story, how he builds up the information? That’s what you should do too, in your dissertation.