Our Expertise, Your PhD Degree

(Image belongs to Jorge Cham @ www.phdcomics.com)

In this newsletter, I want to remind those of you still working on your dissertation what Statistics Solutions can do to assist you to complete your dissertation. As the cartoon describes, time ticks by, and sometimes the faculty don’t quite help as much as we’d like. Our core expertise is in every section of the dissertation. Here are 11 types of help we will provide:

1. Dissertation Topic Selection:Help you swiftly select a topic that is researchable, fits within your discipline, and gets approved. There are several approaches to topic development. One is looking for archival data, backing-out research questions, and developing a methodology from there.
2. Concept Paper, Proposal Writing, and Prospectus:Work with you to develop research questions and testable hypotheses, find gaps in the literature, create a problem statement, select a theoretical framework, and sketch out a methodology. This is the first big step to a doable dissertation–and should take no longer than a quarter.
3. Introduction:Assist you to identify and articulate the research problem, describe the theoretical construct, and clearly talk about the nature of the study.
4. Literature Review:Assist you to effectively search, select, organize, and summarize articles, then present in a way that tells a story that drives towards your research questions. Help ensure the gap in the literature is clearly stated and aligns with the problem statement.  While we think it’s ridiculous to have to update articles (why not just grandfather your articles), we help replace and update articles as necessary.
5. Methodology:The methodology needs to clearly tell the reader how you will conduct your study.  Think about it like a cookbook that is detailed enough that your next-door neighbor can replicate your study. We help you select and discuss the research design and provide the steps necessary to carry out a qualitative or quantitative study. Whether you’re conducting quantitative or qualitative research, we ensure the data plan and sample size are accurate and select the correct analyses.
6. IRB/URR:These review processes have gotten more thorough over the past few years. In the old days, IRB was a matter of protecting participants; IRB now looks at your entire study and can keep you in “IRB jail” for over a quarter! We assist you in completing and navigating through the IRB review process. Help effectively address needed revisions ensures a speedy approval.
7. Data Management:Help code, merge, clean, and overall manage your quantitative or qualitative data. Rarely data is clean, ready to conduct analyses. Another set of eyes on creating composite scores, working with missing data, and accurately labeling data are the right moves towards clean, clear results.
8. Results–Quantitative Data Analysis:Validate your data plan to make sure it examines your research questions, conduct descriptive statistics, assess assumptions, help to generate and present analyses, and create tables and figures. Most importantly, we make sure you’re comfortable with the analyses, guide you through the process, and make sure you can defend it.
9. Results–Qualitative Data Analysis:At the end of a qualitative data analysis, you need to see the big picture. Assistance in conducting case study, phenomenological, or grounded theory research. Help can include transcribing interviews, coding data, selecting themes, and assessing the reliability of the themes. Having a second eye on thematizing data is recommended.
10. Discussion:Help you to interpret your results, where you turn facts into meaning. Together, we can discuss the theoretical and practical implications of your findings in relation to your discipline, and in relation to existing literature. We’ll also assist in thinking through potential future research.
11. Oral Defense:Help prep you for preliminary and final oral defense.

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Get Your Dissertation Approved

We work with graduate students every day and know what it takes to get your research approved.

• Address committee feedback
• Roadmap to completion
• Understand your needs and timeframe