A Dissertation Example is a Wonderful Thing!
April 30, 2015 - Posted to Dissertation topics and examples
Your dissertation will be unique in many ways. First, the research question you have devised is yours and yours alone. Your methodology, although it may resemble methodologies used in a number of other dissertations in your field, is still unique, because your specific design and implementation will have tweaks that are uniquely yours; the instruments that you device will be original. Still, given all of that, you have never created a dissertation before. In addition to your literature review, and in addition to the implementation and analysis of your study, you are also learning exactly how to put a dissertation together. For this reason, having dissertation examples in your field is a resource that in just invaluable. Let’s take a quick look at the parts of a dissertation, so that you can grasp the importance of having a good example of dissertation writing to use as a guide.
The Proposal
The proposal must contain some very specific features. You may have a listing of them from your advisor, but nothing can beat having an example of a dissertation proposal to review and study before you ever begin to write yours. Begin able to see how someone else introduced and worded their research question will allow you to fashion yours well. In fact, having several examples of dissertation proposals will let you see variances among topic areas that might be important to you. How a good proposal summarizes the literature and states the objectives of the proposed project will help you structure your own. Describing methodology can be tricky, but if you have an example dissertation proposal to guide you, the task will be easier and probably more acceptable to your committee.
The Literature Review
Dissertation literature reviews are unique in structure, and, unless you have an example of a dissertation literature to review and study, you may end up with a flawed chapter. You must organize the research of others so that similar studies with similar results are treated together, similar studies with different results are treated separately, and so that dis-similar studies that give results pertinent to your study are treated as a group as well. If you can study examples of dissertations that have literature reviews in your field, this task of synthesizing all of the research will be much more efficiently accomplished.
The Methodology
You want to describe your research methods clearly and thoroughly so that anyone reading your dissertation, either your committee of future researchers, will know exactly what you did and how you did it. Find a dissertation methodology example that is similar to yours, and review the wording and organization. It will give you a solid foundation as you write up your own methodology.
The Results
Here is where examples of dissertation works with similar methodologies really come in handy. Look at the charts and graphs that are used to report the results. Can you use similar ones? If so, you have great graphic models as you create your own with your unique data.
The Analysis/Discussion
This is a tough chapter is you are not an accomplished statistician. The first thing you want to do is locate example dissertation analyses that have used the same formulae that you are using. By studying how the data was fed into these formulae, you have the models you need for your own analysis. Of course, many students employ statisticians for assistance with this chapter, and TrustedDissertations.com has such statisticians. Feel free to contact us for expert assistance.
Writing the Conclusion
You have your results; you have your full analysis; you have determined the significance of what you have done. Now, it is time for your concluding remarks. Address the results, of course, but also discuss the constraints under which your study was conducted and any nuisance factors that may have skewed the results in minor ways. Point future researchers in new directions to build upon your research. Reading examples of dissertation conclusions from several other dissertations will give you good structural and content ideas for you own, so use them as guides.
Using an example of dissertation proposal, literature reviews, methodologies, results, analysis, discussion, and conclusion chapters just makes sense. As you conduct your preliminary review of the literature for your proposal, select two or three dissertations that you can use as models for each of your chapters. You will discover how much easier constructing those chapters will be.