Full Description
How To Do a Dissertation in Record Time with Government Data: A Primer is written to help students in the social sciences and education do their dissertations in as few as four years from start to finish. Its purpose is to show doctoral students how to conceptualize, formulate and investigate a research problem using government data. Two data sets are used. One is the General Social Survey (GSS), which is used by social scientists and contains some of the best information available on American society. The other data used in this book is from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the gold standard for data on U.S. K-12 education. Both sets of data are free and available online.
Contents
Part I: Overview and Commonsense Questions
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Doctoral Program Overview
Chapter 3: The Structure of the Traditional Dissertation
Chapter 4: 10 Commonsense Questions
Chapter 5: The Practical and Theoretical Questions
Chapter 6: From "Topic" To Research Question
Part II: The Dissertation
Chapter 7: Problem Statement
Chapter 8: Literature Review and Conceptual Framework
Chapter 9: Methodology
Chapter 10: Data Analysis and Discussion
Chapter 11: Summary, Conclusions and Recommendations
Part III The Mind's Eye
Chapter 12: The Mind's Eye
Appendix A
Accessing the GSS Data
Accessing the NAEP Data
References
About the Author
