By Steve Creech | January 22, 2011
1) It starts with personal interest
in a “general topic” within your area of specialization. Most likely this topic
is something you are familiar with from personal or professional experience.
2) Conduct some preliminary
literature review to insure the general topic you have in mind has not already
been thoroughly researched and published (i.e. don’t reinvent the wheel).
3) Once you have identified a
general topic and you have done enough literature review to know you are not
reinventing the wheel, hire a statistician to help with the statistical aspects
of your proposal.
Aside: I charge on a fixed price
basis. Whether you get me on-board from day one, or after attempting to get
your entire proposal accepted, only to have it rejected one or more times, the
price is the same. It is almost always “more” work for me to help a doctoral
student that has gotten very far into the proposal than to help a doctoral
student that is just starting out. The sooner you start working with a
statistical consultant, the smoother things will go for you. With my services,
since it is the same price, why not get me on-board early?
4) Consult with the statistician
about your topic and share your ideas about what sort of data you want to
collect (e.g. maybe you have a particular survey in mind, or an archived data
set). The statistician can advise you on methodological considerations relating
to your planned approach. Most likely the statistician will point out a variety
of options, each of which has pros and cons, and the choices you make have
implications for your problem statement, purpose of the study, research
questions, instrumentation, population and more.
5) After the consultation with the
statistician, you should have a rough draft of your problem statement, purpose
of the study, research questions, independent and dependent variables, research
questions, instrumentation, population and data collection strategy.
Aside: I almost always send a rough
draft of that information after the first collaborative phone consultation.
Then, within a matter of 7 days or less, I will have completed all of the
statistical considerations for your proposal (e.g. data analysis plan, sample
size justification).
6) Once you receive the write-up of
the statistical considerations from the statistician (just a cleaned up,
technically written documentation of what we collaborated on during the initial
consultation), then it is just a matter of incorporating that information into
the current draft of your proposal.
7) Actually writing the proposal
from this point on is largely an organizational challenge. I believe you should
use the following process to “construct” the proposal:
1. Start with a blank Word Document.
2. Insert the title on page 1
3. Copy the Table of Contents from
the rubric onto pages 2 through however many pages it takes.
4. On the very next page, insert the
chapter heading (e.g. CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION), and underneath that, insert
each of the section headings that go in that chapter. Make sure the section
headings match the rubric. Don’t add additional headings, don’t leave any out,
and don’t change the order.
5. Repeat step four for chapters 2
(Literature review) and 3 (Methodology).
6. Make a copy of the document you
just created and save it as something like “Disseration Proposal Shell”.
7. Using a copy of the “Shell” from
step 6, start with chapter 1. Skim through the sub-headings and pick the one
you feel the most confident in, the one you think you could write off the top
of your head (i.e. the low hanging fruit).
8. Write as little as you possibly
can in that section, while capturing all of the main points that you think
should be in that section. Try to keep it to one paragraph or less if possible.
9. Pick the next section in chapter
1 that you feel most comfortable with and repeat step 8.
10. Continue steps 8 and 9 until you
get stuck. If you are stuck, if it has anything to do with statistics, consult
with your statistician for advice. If it is a subject matter issue, maybe you
need to stop and do more literature review.
11. Follow steps 8-10 until you have
1 paragraph or less written in every section of chapter 1. You might find that
while doing this, you can fill in some of the sections in chapters 2 and 3. Go
ahead and do that also. After all, you should have the research questions,
hypotheses, data analysis plan, power analysis and other statistical
considerations from your statistician by this point, and that all goes in
chapter 3.
12. Once you have written 1
paragraph or less in every section of chapters 1, 2 and 3, stop and save a
copy. That is your “bird’s eye view” of the entire proposal.
13. Work on cleaning up the “Bird’s
Eye View” of your proposal until it flows naturally, with smooth transitions
from one section to the next.
14. Review each section again and
ask yourself, did I “mention each core idea” that needs to go into this section
(check the rubric for what should be there)? If you missed an idea, add it. Do
this for all of the sections and save this as Bird’s Eye View Revision 1.
15. Run the Bird’s Eye View draft
past your statistician. He or she should be able to tell you if there are any
inconsistencies with what you wrote, and the statistical aspects of your study.
The statistician should also be able to give you critical input about how to
make the paper flow logically.
16. Now that you have this Bird’s
eye view of the proposal finished, it is just a matter of “fleshing out” each
section. What I would do is take each main “idea” within each section,
determine how long I want that section to be, and then decide how much I want
to expand on each main idea until that section is the desired length.
17. At this point you should have a
well organized and nearly complete dissertation proposal. Read through it
carefully, correct as many grammar and punctuation mistakes as possible and try
to make the transitions from one section to the next as smooth as possible.
Then, submit that draft to your statistician for another review.
18. The statistician will likely
recommend a number of revisions to help organize the proposal and to insure
what you wrote is consistent with the statistical aspects of the study. Work
with the statistician back and forth until there are no further revisions from
the statistician’s perspective.
19. Submit the proposal to your
mentor. The mentor will likely have several comments, questions and suggested
revisions. Share those comments with your statistician. You want to make sure
you understand any comments and questions that relate to the statistical
aspects of your study. Work with your statistician to develop responses to the
reviewer’s comments.
Aside: Just because the mentor
suggested a revision doesn’t mean you should make that revision. Remember, you
probably know 10 times more about your study than your mentor does at this
point. You have probably spent several weeks if not months of intensive work on
just this one study, whereas your mentor has to teach and probably mentor
several other doctoral students as well.
20. Once you have developed a
response to every comment from the mentor, making revisions where you and your
statistician felt they were appropriate, send the revised draft back to the
mentor.
21. Repeat steps 19 and 20 until the
mentor has no further comments and passes it on to the other committee members.
22. Repeat steps 19-21 for the other
committee members until they are satisfied and they submit the proposal to the
ARB, IRB, external reviewer or whatever the next step is at your university.
23. By this point, you should be
very close to having an accepted proposal.
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