2.3 The qualitative dissertation: still hazy after all these years  (Page 10/14)

One student, who was studying professional community in an elementary school and had gained entry under the existing principal, was asked not to return by the replacement principal when the original principal became ill and took leave of absence. The new principal was coincidentally the student’s current husband’s former wife. The student, with the careful guidance and intervention of the committee, was able to conduct the remaining interviews in an off-campus location and supplement with some focus group data.

The committee assisted the student in rethinking the study to overcome this barrier. If the question is methodologically complicated, a meeting of the committee’s“minds,”as opposed to a unilateral decision by the chair, may avert subsequent discord. Another situation that can benefit from additional committee feedback occurs when a student, usually in the phase of full immersion in the data, begins to doubt the process and/or the chair’s counsel. Reinforcement can be helpful to the student in getting“unstuck.”

I joined a dissertation committee as the methods advisor for an EdD student who had been required by his committee to conduct his dissertation study on the superintendent in another school district besides the one in which he worked. This required the student to take off many days of work in order to conduct interviews and to sit in on meetings in addition to reviewing documents. In one committee meeting about 8 months into data collection, the student expressed frustration, exasperation really, with the inordinate amount of time that he had been required to commit to this project when other students in his cohort were defending in a few weeks. The superintendent in the district under study was difficult to schedule and, because the study was politically sensitive, the internal administrative staff were reluctant to trust the student as researcher. The student had requested a meeting to ask permission to study his own district, in spite of the amount of time that he had already spent in the present study. The chair had agreed to call the meeting in an effort to restate and reinforce the original decision of studying another district. Near the end of the meeting, the student was asked to leave and allow the committee to make a decision. Committee members could see that the student would have difficulty completing the study as framed, and, in fact, appeared to be on the verge of giving up the dissertation. After much discussion, the committee was able to convince the chair that rigor could be maintained in a careful crafted“insider”study. The committee helped the student to reframe the study as an insider, participant observer study honoring the tenets of rigor indicated for that kind of researcher role.

The story of this floundering student illustrates, through lived experience, the incredible influence that the chair and committee have over the process, and how a simple decision to increase the number of interviews or the venue for the study can have exponential impact on students’time and resources. I can cite numerous examples where committee members eschewed the idea of a single case design or wanted 20 interview respondents instead of 12. The impact on students can be devastating. Often these directions emerge from a lack of understanding or a lack of trust in qualitative methods. In this respect, the choice of committee members as well as the selection of a chair who can articulate clearly what constitutes rigor is invaluable to moving students through the qualitative dissertation study. I have been guilty of such decisions as well.