You’ve no doubt heard the adage “a good dissertation is a done dissertation.” Because The Dissertation Group™ has chaired tens of dissertations and been members of more than 100 dissertation committees, we can tell you that a done dissertation is a very, very focused dissertation. When The Dissertation Group™ develops a topic for your dissertation, it will be focused so that it meets the following criteria for a dissertation to indeed be done:
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Original to the academic literature
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Responsive to a contemporaneous, real-world problem
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Feasibility in terms of data collection
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Appropriate to your degree program
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Per your personal topical interests
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Per your research design and methods preferences
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Collaborative development between you and your dissertation mentor
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Originality
For your dissertation topic to be approved, it must be demonstrably original to the academic literature. This does not mean that your topic must be one-of-a-kind in a general sense. But it must be one-of-a-kind in the specific sense. The originality of your dissertation topic may be that it introduces a new moderator or mediator to a quantitative model. Or your dissertation topic may be original because you go “deep rather than broad” with the collection of your data, implementing a phenomenology of twelve individuals rather than a large-N survey.
The Dissertation Group™ guarantees that your dissertation topic will be an original contribution to the academic literature.
Responsiveness
For your dissertation topic to be approved, it must be driven by a societal, institutional, political, economic, sociodemographic, and/or organizational problem. In other words, it should be easy for you to answer the “So what?” question about your dissertation topic. The problem to which your dissertation topic is a response should be demonstrable with recent statistics.
Dissertation Group™ guarantees that your dissertation topic will be responsive to a contemporaneous problem that is demonstrable with publicly available statistics.
Feasibility
For your dissertation topic to be approved, it must be feasible in terms of data collection, whether quantitative, qualitative, or mixed. The three major barriers to data collection are vulnerable populations, inaccessible populations, and social response bias.
The Dissertation Group™ guarantees that your dissertation topic will be feasible in terms of data collection.
Vulnerable Populations
Your topic must not focus on a population that the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at your university will deem vulnerable. For example, your dissertation topic in most cases will not be approved by the IRB at your university if you plan on interviewing or surveying individuals who are under 18 years of age.
Inaccessible Populations
Your topic must not focus on a population that you will have a difficult time accessing for data collection. For example, as a doctoral candidate, you will almost never convince any (much less enough for data analysis) C-level leaders of Fortune 500 companies to participate in a focus group, online survey, or semi-structured interview.
Social Response Bias
There are simply some topics that are impossible to collect valid and reliable data for. For example, if you would like to quantitatively analyze the extent to which explicit racism co-varies with the decision making, the data that you collect for the former will demonstrate practically no variation.[1]
[1] Lanz, L., Thielmann, I., & Gerpott, F. H. (2022). Are social desirability scales desirable? A meta‐analytic test of the validity of social desirability scales in the context of prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality, 90(2), 203-221.
Appropriateness
For your dissertation topic to be approved, it must be within the purview of your doctoral program’s curriculum. For example, if you are a doctoral candidate in a business school, a topic focused on the personality types of different types of workers may be deemed inappropriate because personality type does not inform administrative decision making, at least not directly. Moreover, a topic focused on businesses likely would be deemed inappropriate by a doctoral committee in a school of public administration.
The Dissertation Group™ guarantees that your dissertation topic will be appropriate to your doctoral degree program.
Your personal interests and preferences
The Dissertation Group understands well that you must be interested in the topic of your dissertation. Else, you will not ever graduate. This does not mean that your dissertation must be your magnum opus, most certainly it will not be. However, to spend the hundreds of hours it will take you to complete your dissertation, you must feel a personal connection to the topic and be comfortable with the research design and methods.
The Dissertation Group™ will collaborate with you when developing your dissertation topic to ensure it meets your interests topically and your preferences methodologically.
Topic Development