Dissertation Defense Prep: A 4-part POWER series. The good news has finally arrived! You’ve spent hundreds of hours (but what probably has felt like millions of hours) working on your dissertation. You’ve been planning, brainstorming, proposing, outlining, drafting, researching, writing, screaming, kicking, crying, celebrating, and everything in between, in order to finally get your initial draft completed. You’ve submitted this draft to your adviser and other committee members and, finally, … [Read more...]
SPSS Help: A Brief Tutorial
SPSS Help: A Brief Tutorial What is SPSS? Do you need SPSS help? SPSS is an IBM creation and stands for the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. It is an effective yet simple software for analyzing data inputs. This data can come from just about any source you can imagine: dissertation research, a customer resource management database, in-house marketing research, or even the server log data of a website. SPSS is also able to open numerous file formats, usually those related to … [Read more...]
A Dissertation Checklist: 5 Questions to Check Your Progress
A Dissertation Checklist: 5 Questions to Check Your Progress How hard do you work? How hard do you study? As a student who has reached the doctorate level, no doubt you’ve worked very hard to get to this point. With that being said, do you feel like no matter how hard you work, you are still behind on the dissertation goals you set for the coming months or year? If this is the case, you probably think to yourself that you simply must work harder and longer. Or maybe you are questioning … [Read more...]
7 Ways to Meet your PhD Deadlines
Do you find it really difficult to meet dissertation deadlines that you set? Do you find it hard to fulfill your personal deadlines especially when there is no great amount of extrinsic motivation coming from colleagues, dissertation supervisors and others? If so, this article discusses different ways that will greatly help you meet your deadlines and finally achieve those dissertation goals. In my experience, I found that there were 7 steps that I keep taking in order to stay motivated and … [Read more...]
Dissertation Writing: How to Write your Conclusion
In this blog post, you’ll learn exactly how to write the last chapter of your doctoral dissertation. In particular, you will get oriented with the overall goals of the conclusion chapter. Then, you’ll be taught on how to go about writing the chapter itself. Finally, you will be given guidance on what things to avoid in the ever-important final chapter of your dissertation. The Main Goals of your Dissertation Conclusion Before going into how to actually write the conclusion chapter of your … [Read more...]
Dissertation Pitfalls III: Sinking into your Literature Review
As many doctoral students have already experienced, the literature review chapter can literally be hell. The chapter is completely unique from the other chapters and, for doctoral students inexperienced in advanced academic writing, it can lead to all kinds of trouble. Therefore, this article is written as a guide containing certain principles for you to keep in mind when writing your literature review chapter. Following them will help you avoid sinking into the literature review quagmire. This … [Read more...]
12 Steps to Write an Effective Discussion Chapter
This article gives doctoral dissertation students valuable guidance on how to go about writing their Discussion chapter. The article starts by outlining the main goals and writing approaches. Then the article explains 12 specific steps to take to write an effective Discussion chapter. Discussion Chapter: Main Goals and Writing Approaches You should always keep in mind the main goals when writing your Discussion chapter. These include stating your interpretations, declaring your opinions, … [Read more...]
Avoiding Common Errors in your Literature Review
As so many doctoral students working on their dissertations have discovered, writing the literature review chapter is a tedious process involving many steps and pitfalls. To help save you time and heartache, this article will show you the most common mistakes encountered when putting together your literature review. These common literature review errors are broken down into three general categories: Writing & Stylistic Issues Issues with Literature Review Structure & Elements … [Read more...]
NVIVO Mini-Tutorial 2: Importing your Literature Review
Importing your literature review files This mini tutorial shows you how to import your literature review files into NVIVO. Most likely, your literature review files will either be scattered across your computer or other storage medium or be stored onto a centralized program like Endnote (a program to manage literature review, bibliographies, and more). Therefore, there are two general ways to import your literature review files to NVIVO: By manually importing your literature review … [Read more...]
Dealing with PhD Stress
The entire process of writing a PhD dissertation is a tedious one. From thinking of your research topic, coming up with a research question, and choosing a sample, to testing that sample, selecting a research method, doing a literature review, conducting the actual research, analyzing the results, and putting it all together, all this is not easy to do. The Importance of Stress Management During PhD Dissertation Work Compounding the stress of writing a PhD dissertation with the stress of daily … [Read more...]