Dissertation Proposal Process

The dissertation proposal has many chapters, including:

1)  Introduction & Statement of the Problem
2)  Critical Review of the Literature
3)  Theoretical Framework
4)  Hypotheses & Research Questions
5)  Methodology
6)  Data Collection & Analysis
7)  Timeline

I am on my seventh iteration of the statement of problem (I decided to stop counting when I completely re-wrote it again last night).

The familiar inspiration process is re-occurring.  I, an avowed non-morning person, find myself rising at the ungodly hour of 5 or 6 am (on a weekend!) to write something that has occurred to me upon barely waking.   When I described these experiences to Dr. Crimmins, she referred to them as "downloads."  The metaphor resonates for me. Sometimes I go back to bed as soon as I have transcribed the download.

I have amassed hundreds of articles in probably the last five years or so.  So I have been diligently organizing and filing them in electronic folders (for each chapter of the proposal) and sub-folders (sub-categories in each chapter).  For instance, the Methods folder has the following sub-folders:  Community-Based Participatory Research, Mediators/Moderators, Outcome Studies, Measures, Qualitative Research, and so on.

As I do this, I come across articles that represent the nexus of three or more of the concepts that I am addressing in my proposal.  I put these in a separate folder called the "Smoking Gun" articles.  Sometimes I come across these articles when I am searching for other articles, purely by serendipity. ;)
Anyway, there are 50 articles in my smoking gun collection.  I have about a week to read these so I can write a draft of my lit review for Zeke's class due the following week.  I am taking notes on the abstracts of these 50 to prioritize them for reading and labeling them for chapter relevance and use.  I am about a third of the way done and came across theeeeee smoking gun article of all smoking gun articles.  It will serve as a template for what I am trying to do.  Thanks, Beardslee et al, for your scholarship! 

Logging the hours, doing the work, and I have never been happier.

Here are some cool quotes that introduce one of the articles in my pile:

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein

Fools act on imagination without knowledge, pedants on knowledge without imagination.
Alfred North Whitehead

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our heart, than to put on a cloak of non-violence to cover impotence.
M. K. Gandhi

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.
Alphonse Bertillon

From:
A Personal Account of Lessons About the Relationship Between Violent Hope, Hopeful Violence and the Development of Therapeutic Imagination: The Legacy of Bruno Bettelheim
Leslie A. Cleaver, L.C.S.W.