Starting a Dissertation Project

Transcription

1 Starting a Dissertation Project January 2007 Choosing a Topic People often fall into three pitfalls at the outset of a dissertation project: 1. Political scientists have long been interested in... People often rely on the literature to justify their project. You can fall into the trap of reviewing the literature too much and not focusing on your own ideas. Don t the the literature set your agenda or limit your thinking excessive reliance on the literature can actually lead to a smaller contribution than you are capable of. 2. But surprisingly little work has been done on... Many more things have not been studied than have been. There is a reason for this. The fact that something has been unexamined in and of itself is not a good justification for you studying it. Tell us why not studying it is a big problem for the way we understand the world. 3. Don t focus merely on what s doable and handy to guide your project. Start by asking something really important and interesting, then figure out how to make it manageable. Dissertation projects are really tough to start from a cold stop. Try to find something you ve already been thinking about, an idea that s been germinating in the back of your mind for a while, something that may have arisen in a seminar, in your studying for prelims, or in something else you ve been reading or working on. You can always go back to old reaction papers you ve written, articles you ve liked, or notes you ve taken to mine them for ideas. One thing a lot of people do is keep an ideas folder of interesting ideas, topics, notes, etc. just jot down anything that strikes you as having some potential for development, whenever you see it or think of it, and stick it in the folder. Whenever you re stuck, go back to the ideas folder and see if anything pops out at you. Try to tease out an idea and see where it goes. While you are studying for prelims is a great time to start filling up your ideas folder. A couple good ways to think about developing a topic: Think about social/political science as a conversation, and ask yourself two kinds of questions. First, how does the current conversation lead us to miss something important? Second, how can your project move this conversation in a more fruitful direction? This could be in one of many ways measuring something in a better way than it has been before, recognizing something important that has been ignored, bringing two streams of thinking together that haven t spoken to each other before, etc. Notes from the UW Madison Political Science Grad Association (PSGA) professional development workshop held on December 12, Thanks to Leigh Payne, Jon Pevehouse, Joe Soss, Barry Burden, David Canon, Mark Copelovitch, Paul Hutchcroft, Bert Kritzer, Michael Schatzberg, and 21 student participants in the workshop for the ideas and advice collected here. 1

2 What is the puzzle that current theory leaves unexplained, and how will you solve it? How is your project important to politics, not just political science? Your dissertation should make a double contribution: both theoretical and empirical. Think about what your project will sound like in a job talk. You need to be able to make the case that your project is both interesting and relevant. What s your punchline? What will you say when someone who could hire you asks you about your research in the elevator at APSA? Have a 30 second version of your dissertation that makes people want to know what you find out. Also, remember that you ll have to sell your project to people outside of your field why does political science need your research? You must be passionate about your choice of projects, because you ll have to work on it and live with it for years. You can t start off lukewarm imagine how you ll feel three years down the road. On the other hand, be a little cautious. Do think about how your project will brand you. In many ways, your dissertation will define where you sit in terms of the categories that organize our profession e.g., a public opinion scholar, a critical constructivist, a gender studies person, a formal theorist. Think about how you want to be situated in the profession there may be reason to postpone certain projects. What scholarly community do you most want to be a part of? What kind of job do you want? And at the same time, don t try to game the system by choosing a topic that s hot or that you think will be by the time you finish. One of the biggest risks in writing a dissertation is not finishing it, so you have to actually care about what you are working on, even three years down the road. And you don t know what the field will look like when you finally get to the job market. Keep timing issues in mind. Some projects are more suitable for specific times in your career than others. For a dissertation, you need to finish in a finite period of time. Your first draft will almost always be too big. After taking prelims, you ve got the whole field in your head. Now you need to focus back down and distill that information into a few usable strands. Developing Your Ideas Your proposal is not set in stone. The point is to construct a good guideline for both your theoretical and empirical contributions, your research design, etc., but a lot of things will necessarily change as you go. Allow yourself some freedom to pursue what excites you as you progress. Be prepared to write many iterations of your proposal. It s a weird form of writing (as if you know something you don t actually know yet), but you need to be able to sell funders and others on what you are going to do. Your proposal will only get better from repeated rounds of critique. Let people take it apart and then put it back together again. The first draft always needs major help, but let people help you find the gems within it and strip away the rest. Then build it back up from there. 2

3 Work on striking the right balance between theory and empirics your project should make a contribution in both regards. There will be a continual back and forth between these two as you go, and what s key will often sort itself out over time. What kinds of resources exist in other disciplines that we could make use of? Don t reinvent the wheel when you can draw on work already out there outside of your subfield, your field, your discipline. Read outside your area! Don t be afraid to be playful, even in atheoretical ways. Play around with data, odd combinations of readings, whatever. Do some exploring. See what you find. Connect your ideas to something concrete to show how it s interesting and important and give yourself some time to develop your ideas and see where they go. Don t be afraid to be bold and creative. Steven Van Evera recommends five pages for a proposal. This is a little extreme, but it can be a good exercise for your own benefit. Take two paragraphs to summarize: what is the current conversation around your topic and what s wrong with it? Then take the rest of the five pages to discuss what you are going to do to address it. Once you re done, go back and re engage the literature on your terms. In some ways, it can be helpful to think of the process as akin to sculpture rather than painting. You achieve your final project by chipping away rather than by adding more and more. If it s not directly related to your question, leave it for another time. Some projects develop more inductively than deductively. In this case, it can be harder to justify your project s viability ex ante. Try doing some pilot investigations drill pilot holes to show that there is something tractable where you want to go. Come back with a little data, a coding sheet, something tangible you can talk about. You can t always just think your way to a finished proposal do some digging and see what is there (see Charles Jones Doing Before Knowing ). Sometimes you can t really finish the proposal before you go out and just start a little bit of your project to inform and hone your thinking on the subject. Go do a couple interviews or collect some data. But doing grounded theory is not a license not to know where you are going and why. Talk to people completely outside of political science and see what they find interesting about what you are doing. Take advantage of pilot grants and other opportunities to test out your initial ideas. Using the Literature Well Don t put your focus on a big literature review of your subfield. The lit review should serve your project focus in tightly on the holes, contradictions, or unrecognized connections in the literature that your project remedies. Your lit review should suggest hypotheses for your project to explore. How are you moving theory forward in some direction? 3

4 A helpful exercise may be to do a full lit review, but only for yourself. Think of it as a background briefing or a way to organize your notes on all the literature you will draw upon in your project. But this definitely doesn t belong in your actual proposal. The purpose of the proposal is to outline an interesting, important, and doable project, not to prove to people how smart you are or how much you ve read. Often you face the problem of having too many literatures on which to draw. How do you pick the connection or connections you really want to highlight? It s not a permanent decision your literature commitments aren t set in stone. You may pick one particular way to ground your work in the literature at the outset of your project, but keep the others on the backburner. You may want to keep them around to plug into your conclusion, highlight in a job talk, etc. Or, you may switch streams in the midst of your project, and it s good to have them on hand. The literature that brought you somewhere may not be the literature your work ends up being most relevant to. What you draw on and what you have to say back (and to whom) are different things. Applying for Funding Especially in comparative politics, some funding proposals can be no more than two single spaced pages, and they are due as early as September. Keep this in mind and get to it! There is a creative interplay between dissertation proposals and funding proposals, especially for people doing field work. The two proposals are often similar, but writing funding proposals may force you to express key ideas in a space shorter than in your dissertation proposal. Use this as a helpful way to distill your ideas and your contribution, as well as to capture what s interesting about your project for general audiences. It can be really helpful to develop a set of different versions of your proposal the 2 page version, 5 page version, 10 page version, 30 page version, etc. Keep the jargon out of your proposal, especially for funding applications. The people reading them are often people outside of your field and without the same background you have. Protecting Yourself Against Failure Writing a dissertation involves significant risk. You don t know what you re going to find. So be willing to venture out and challenge what s assumed, but figure out ways to protect yourself against failure if/when things don t go exactly as planned: Avoid excessively risky situations where your project hinges on a particular piece of evidence or a particular finding. Position yourself to find something interesting, even if it s not what you expect. Ask yourself, are there good reasons to think that this work will be productive regardless of one particular result you hope will emerge? Think about how your project might work under different scenarios that present themselves on the ground. 4

5 Sometimes, null findings can themselves be interesting. Figure out how this could be the case in your research. Sharing Your Ideas Don t hold your ideas too close to the vest. Let other people help you recognize what is interesting and important about the research you re doing, and don t worry too much about giving your ideas away. Sharing them with people and getting feedback will only improve your project. Don t get too worried if someone else has published or is working on a similar project to yours. The chances that you ll do it in exactly the same way are essentially nil. And since no one has studied it is not a great reason to start a project, there will be other people working on your topic. Having a research community interested in your work is a good thing, not a bad one. What Does a Proposal Look Like? There are no specific guidelines. The typical proposal is pages long. Although there are variations across projects and fields, the basic outline of a proposal is something like: 1. Puzzle/conversation/problem 2. Theory 3. Data 4. Methods 5. Chapter outline 6. Timetable/road map to completion Think about your proposal as sort of an introductory chapter to your dissertation. In any case, it should be useful: for funding proposals, as a first chapter, etc. Your proposal is not always going to be a perfect road map, but it should tell a story of where you might end up and why any of those outcomes would be interesting and important. Some Final Words Set a timetable for when you want/need to have different parts of your project completed. Refer back to it often to help you keep pace with where you need to be. Writing a dissertation is an emotional process. Don t fall into the trap of an all or nothing mentality you will always be making adjustments. Resist the temptation to abandon your project altogether! That said, there is a good chance that your project will change significantly, sometimes drastically, between your proposal and the end product. That s okay! 5