Tips for Organizing Your Dissertation Proposal

Writing Your Main Question

This is a first draft of your dissertation. These sections should thus be considered preliminary in their ingredients and points. However, it is crucial to begin to organize them as if they were the final dissertation, so that you can receive useful feedback from your supervisor.

Tip: One paragraph on each: Main question, main gap in literature, main preliminary argument, description of the likely empirical strategy.

Tip: This is where you will present the literature that informs your supervisor of what has been said about your question but also what has not been said and thus reveals the gap you are seeking to fill.

Tip: Make sure all literature is on your dependent variable. Make sure you group research by its main independent variable. Make sure you use this to demonstrate the gap in the literature. Your last paragraph points out this gap.

Tip: This is where you will showcase how you will fill the gap in the literature above. Here, you present your argument for doing that. Try to be as specific as possible about your argument, so that you can receive appropriate feedback on it.

Tip: Include literature here that help you justify your case, which is your causal mechanism. Include at least one paragraph on the main outcomes of the dependent variable to explain how the independent variable produces that outcome. (For example, how high  values on the IV lead to high values of the DV; how low values of the IV lead to low values of the DV; how medium values of the IV lead to medium values of the DV.)

• Research Design / Empirical Strategy:

Tip: This is where you will present the concepts, measures, and data and sources you will analyze to test your argument. You must also explain how you will gather this data and how you will analyze it. Try to be as specific as possible about what you intend to do. Tip: Think of this as a recipe for ensuring that anyone could replicate what you did and find exactly the same thing you do. Explain the universe of cases to which your argument applies, explain your case selection from that universe and why you chose that selection,explain any confounding factors and how you control for them (and on what you base your measures for these controls, that is, how you know they are similar in value). Define the main DV, explain the measure you chose to capture it and why, explain the data and note its source. Define the main IV(s), explain the measure(s) you chose to capture it(them) and why, explain the data and note its source(s). Do the same for any testable hypotheses of the argument, as these can require additional DVs and IVs for analysis. If conducting a statistical analysis, explain any control variables included in the model and why they are there, document sources.

Do not count against word limit

• The proposal is considered to be the first draft of the dissertation. You will thus reuse the proposal materials in the final dissertation.

• Do not include irrelevant text or data. Stick to only what you need in each section to serve its main purpose.

• Do not provide factual material or make factual statements without citations to the source.

• Do not make claims or assertions about anything, including history, literature, relationships, trends, without justifying them, either through citations to sources (and prior research) or through logical argumentation when they are your ideas.

• Building on this last point, verify that you have included citations to sources for all factual statements, claims, and assertions that come from other sources and research. Otherwise, this is plagiarism.

• Consult your supervisors (or other members of staff) for additional guidance.