“Breaking the Mold” in the Dissertation: Implementing a Problem-Based, Decision-Oriented Thesis Project

Abstract

This article offers lessons from an initiative refashioning the doctoral thesis in an education leadership program. The program serves a practitioner clientele; most are teachers and administrators. The new model for the thesis emphasizes leadership, problem solving, decision making, and organizational improvement. The former model was a traditional research-focused thesis. This article describes the rationale for the change and four features of the new problem-based inquiry model contrasted with the traditional research model. A central challenge of this initiative has been fashioning a model that is authentic problem solving and not merely applied research. Both faculty and doctoral advisees have firmly held assumptions and expectations about the thesis-as-research and limited experience with a problem-solving paradigm. Thus, applying an authentic model of problem-based inquiry to the doctoral thesis confronts significant conceptual and practical challenges.

Notes

1 One study of 830 dissertations classified into these areas (public administration, management, planning, criminology, social work, and women's studies) found over 90% were empirical studies (Adams & White, 1994). A book on doctoral programs for administrators contains an appendix with a “Dissertation Template” showing the presumed format for dissertations: a theory/literature review section, research questions/hypotheses, methodology, findings or results, conclusions and implications (Erickson, Howard, Borland, & Baker, 2004).

For literature on the logic and study of organizational problems and decision making, see Beach and Connolly (2005), Bolman and Deal (2003), Buyukdamgaci (2003), Cuban (2001), Gaynor, (1998), Hodgkinson and Starbuck (2008), Richetti and Tregoe (2001), March (1994), Rittel and Weber (1973), and Schon (1983).

Rittel and Weber (1973, p. 159), in a seminal article on this subject, write, “[O]ne of the most intractable problems is that of defining problems (of knowing what distinguishes an observed condition from a desired conditions) and of locating problems (finding where in the complex causal networks the trouble really lies).”