1. Introduction
2. Literature review
3. Methodology
4. Discussion
5. Conclusion

Other relevant sections include acknowledgment, abstract, bibliography, and references. In the humanities field, the dissertation mostly looks like an extended essay where you analyze all your sources and then build an argument. So unlike the standard structure, you may use different case studies or themes emanating from your chapters. Now, below is the structure of a dissertation and what it entails.

The title page

It is one of the most critical aspects of the entire dissertation. It is where you state the title of your dissertation and also personal information. This may include your name, institution, department, and program, among others.  

Abstract

The abstract summarizes the dissertation, and it usually ranges from 150 to 300 words. It is best to write it after completing your dissertation to capture all the critical points stated. Information to include are:

• Topic and aim of the project
• The methodology employed for the research
• Summarise the main points
• Findings conclusion

Table of Contents

The table of content contains the chapters and subheadings in the order of appearance and page numbers. It makes it easier for the reader to know where to find what in the project.

Introduction

The introduction chapter introduces your topic, states the purpose of the research, and why it is important. It also contains a brief dissertation statement, which highlights what to expect in the project. Your introduction must:

• Give background to your research
• Define your scope of work by narrowing down the focus
• State existing findings and why your work is important
• Should give aims and objectives of your project

Literature review

In the literature review, you summarize relevant existing works in the research field and then argue why your research is relevant. Your aim should be identifying gaps or shortfalls in previous works and how yours would bridge that gap.

Methodology

This chapter describes the methods employed in obtaining information for your research. It, therefore, allows readers to determine how shallow or in-depth your work is. You should state the approach used, whether qualitative, quantitative, ethnographic, or experimental methodology. How was your information collected? Is it through interviews, surveys, or existing data? How were the data collected and analyzed?

Results

What results were obtained after the research? Whatever results you state must be relevant and consistent with your research objectives and question. According to your field of studies or methodology used, you may have to combine or separate the results and discussion sections.

Discussion

Here, you explore your research findings by discussing their significance and implication to the research area. It should be able to explain your results in detail and state whether your expectations were met. If your expectations were not met, was it because of your scope of work, methodology, or limitations? You should also be able to state how your results complement existing ones.

Conclusion

In the conclusion section, you state the significant points in your research and briefly answer the research question. It should give your reader a clear understanding or argument of your project without reading it entirely. Here, you can also state further research needed on the topic.

Referencing

This is another important chapter of academic work. Every important source you used in the research should be cited accordingly. It doesn’t matter whether you paraphrased or quoted in entirety. According to your department’s referencing style, it should include the author’s name, the title of work, and the year it was published, among others.

Before starting how to write it, we need to understand what is a dissertation. It is for doctoral degree students and them to have to explain in detail about their research studies are to present it in front of committee members. This is an extensive writing process in which he or she has to work hard and critically analyze the existing data and find sources to support his or her arguments.

1. Write dissertation proposal

This is usually the first stage of the dissertation in which you particularly have to deal with the topic of your Ph.D. dissertation. This proposal defines what is your problem that you are going to conduct the study on and how you will solve it. There are various ways of writing a proposal so let’s look at what are important things to look for proposal.

Chose research problem – The first thing is to choose a research problem. To choose that, you have to decide what research area you are going into it. Then read papers and find a gap in the literature that will give you an idea about the problem. Then think about how this problem remains unsolved for all these years, how are you going to solve it, and what contribution it makes to the community. Answering all those questions will clear your concepts.

Get your dissertation a structural form – Once you define what the problem statement is, then write down all the data in structure format such as to define the methodology and read its background. Organize your content so that it will be easier for you.

2. Do extensive research

It’s essential to discover enough data to completely comprehend the problem you’re centered around, yet you’ll have to quit exploring at some point. Many studies have shown that spending time on research is useless if you don’t aim for any direction. Use this exploration stage as an opportunity that you understand the past research experiences of the problem.

You need to gather authentic data for your dissertation. So, it is better to go to reliable journals. Read published data and analyze the information you want to add and subtract. Effective research will give a good dissertation.

3. Writing dissertation in pieces

Writing a dissertation is typically the most complicated part and requires time and effort. At this stage, most of the students get puzzled and make mistakes in it. Create an outline and write down your dissertation in pieces. You can also take some writing help from your seniors and supervisor but most of the work is done by the student itself. Following is the outline of the dissertation and each section requires a different type of information.

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Methodology
• Result and discussion
• Conclusion

Dividing your task makes things easier for you. Most importantly, two sections require the effort most which are introduction and literature review as you may need to add citations in it to support your argument.

4. Edit and proofread

Professionally read your thesis and edit your mistakes. Checking your grammatical mistakes and make sure you any spelling mistakes. Pay attention to every detail and get rid of unnecessary details. Keep your explanation easy for the reader to understand. Clear you’re your doubts by reading your dissertation again and again.

5. Get some comments on it

Before handing out your dissertation, it is better to take some comments from committee members. Ask them to which area you need to improve. They will suggest to you that it is ready for defense or not. You can also ask your friends or colleague to comment on your dissertation.

Some person argues, that there is not any need to prepare PhD defense. It is difficult for you to present your work in front of the dissertation committee without defense preparation. There is a chance of rejection. So, you should organize yourself during the PhD journey and start writing the first chapters early as possible. Because you have to revise and reread again and again along with the publication study. Defense preparation depends on your dissertation committee, so prepare your defense according to your committee requirements. It will help you to plan the challenges which you have to face on the final defense day.

As I wrote about my PhD journey and explained from the starting point to the last day of defense. You can study all the steps of defense. It is divided into three parts along with defense experiences. I also developed a series of PhD discussion with the title “Defense around the world”. In which I and my PhD fellows have shared their experiences about the PhD journey with defenses.

I penned 10 tips regarding PhD defense, and its preparation. I got much more time for defense preparation because I didn’t know about its preparation. I used a lot of unnecessary activities but it is the requirement of the time. In other words, I did everything important for my defense preparation. If you want to prepare your defense with more interest then you have to work with patients continuously. If you are more confident about defense presentation. You can do only limited things which are necessary for your defense. Here, I wrote some important points for defense preparation.

1.  Attending Conferences:

Your PhD defense journey will be easy if you have some practice presenting your work in front of an international audience with answering questioning sessions. Every presentation will create confidence in your dissertation defense. You can get sharpened presentation skills by doing this. So, you must attend more conferences, presentation events and workshops for better experiences

2. Have a piece of sound information about your committee and their work: 

During defense preparation, you should not make any consideration about the expected question. These expected questions will depend on your defense committee.  You must assess your work keep in mind your committee members and check out the latest publications of committee members. You must read all t the recent publications. The other important thing, evaluate your meeting notes and the key opinions of criticism that you have received during meetings with committee members.

3. Revise the most important papers:

Another important part is past papers that are important for your defense preparation. You can search out the most possible questions from these past papers and prepare them for the foundation of your work.

4. Broader Questions:

Some questions have broader space for your work such as future work and other areas of applications. These kinds of question may be asked. So, you can make a list of such possible questions and prepare the material to answer.

5. Room and Tools:

You have to make sure the standard of your presentation place and the availability of tools for presentation. Are these provided and working properly. You have practiced using these tools. Organize your tools and place them according to your presentation and committee requirements.

6. Be Cool and Unstressed:

You have to be cool and unstressed. If you feel stressed then you can’t think clearly, which make you confused. So, get enough sleep and eat healthy food with exercise a week before the defense day.

7. Plan a Party:

Don’t miss the importance and value of a party on your success. Defense day is your successful day. So, make it a special event with your beloved.  Arrange a party with a nice dinner and enjoy your success.

Understanding secondary research

This type of data is also referred to as “past data” and is only accessible via government records, past researchers, and various online and offline records.

Secondary research is the re-analyzing, reviewing, or interpreting past or previous data to put it into perspective. Your job as a current researcher is to identify and specify how this data informs on your research.

Compared to primary research, secondary research is relatively easier, especially because it is not required to collect data himself or herself also, because secondary research consumes less time and money (for instance, a secondary researcher is not required to pay his participants any form of compensation or any research cost.

Step 1: Develop your research question(s)

Like every other type of research, secondary research begins with developing your research question(s). While at the undergraduate level, you are often provided research questions by your supervisor, but your thesis question’s development rests solely on you at the graduate level.

The first step when developing your research question is to specify a general area where your research falls. For example, you may want to write a study that is strictly about Type 2 Diabetes. Once you have your general topic, you are to research and read existing research papers on the same topic to see if there is any gap in the literature your research can fill. During this reading, you may now discover that there is no previous research that discusses the impact of Anxiety on Type 2 Diabetes patients.

Step 2: Identify a secondary data set

As mentioned above, most research begins by stating what is in the public domain about the topic or what is not. This process requires putting into consideration the kind of data collected on the topic. This step involves reviewing the literature and specifying your research question and deciding whether you want to rely on secondary data and picking out the set of data that could be useful for your research. Once you have figured out the valuable data, you must follow this up by itemizing why you have decided to depend on secondary data.

Step 3: Evaluate the secondary data set

Evaluating the secondary data set is a very important step because, as mentioned earlier, secondary data has its disadvantages, which includes;

• Secondary data may lack reliability and validity
• Original authors may have failed to provide enough information about their research
• Secondary data may not be appropriate for your research purposes
• Secondary data may have a completely different format than you need,
• Secondary data may not necessarily answer your research question

These disadvantages can limit your research; therefore, evaluating the secondary data set is a crucial step that you must not skip. To simplify this process, listed below are a simplified reflective approach for evaluating secondary data.

Step 1 – What was the aim of the original study?

Step 2 – Who has collected the data?

Step 3 – Which measures were employed?

Step 4 – When was the data collected?

Step 5 – The methodology used to collect the data

 Step 6 – Making a final evaluation

Step 4: Prepare and analyze secondary data

While evaluating your secondary data, you must familiarize yourself with the original research (past data). Once that is done; next, you are to prepare a secondary data set, and you can do this by following steps;

• Outline all variables
• Address missing data
• Record variables
• Compute final scores
• Analyze both quantitative and qualitative data.

However, this article aims to explain the process in simple steps:

• Choose the type of data
• Decide on research methodology
• Select a specific primary research method
• Select participants

Step 1: Choose the type of data

The first step in your primary research is deciding what type of data your research will use. You have the option of choosing between primary data, secondary data, and big data. Please note that this article’s focus is on primary research.

Primary data referred to as ‘real-time’ data are the data that has been collected by the researcher. You will majorly rely on this data when doing primary research for your undergraduate or graduate degrees.

Step 2: Choose your primary research methodology

There are different methods of conducting your primary research. When doing primary research, you have the option of relying on qualitative or quantitative methodology or a mixture of both.

Qualitative Methodology

The qualitative research method is exploratory and is often conducted when there is no available quantitative research on the topic or looking to explore the case for the first time.

Quantitative Methodology

On the other hand, quantitative research is confirmatory. The goal of this methodology is to confirm or disconfirm hypotheses based on statistics and analysis available. In quantitative research, you are more concerned with numerical and statistical data, reflecting measurable and fixed reality.

Mixed research

The mixed methodology is a combination of the two types of research methodologies. The goal is to gain a more in-depth and thorough understanding of a particular topic better than you would if you rely on a single method. In mixed research, you must first do qualitative research and then supplement it with quantitative research.

Step 3: An observation

This involves observing a group of people within their setting. Your role as a researcher is to immerse yourself in this setting and take up either a participant’s role or that of a bystander. The goal is to have a close look at how your participants will behave in specific situations.

Step 4: Interviews

This involves creating questions geared towards getting your participants’ opinions, attitudes, and feelings so you can better understand the phenomenon. To avoid loss of data during transfer, you must record your interview sessions and transcribe afterward. You want to make sure everything is well-documented and recorded for reference purposes.

Summary

This guide summarizes the basic steps of conducting primary research for your undergraduate or graduate project. However, these steps are basic at best; you may want a more comprehensive guide on research and writing a dissertation, but all you need to get started are listed above.