Dissertation Graduate Research

The present college and university degree structure has deep roots in more than 700 years of tradition. The connection of advanced degrees with written theses and dissertations goes back in time almost as far.

EMERGENCE OF ADVANCED DEGREES

The awarding of degrees as evidence of advanced study occurred in a time when skill in argument and appeal to authority were valued highly. The thesis and dissertation (THESIS AND DISSERTATION) constituted components of well-reasoned arguments. The successful applicant had to take a position (the thesis), buttress it with logic, and relate it to the earlier conclusions of respected scholars (the dissertation ) to the point that it could not be refuted. That concept of the THESIS AND DISSERTATION gave rise to a viewpoint that continues to this day, namely that the final act with regard to THESIS AND DISSERTATION study is the defense of the study by the student before a group of probing questioners. Historically, successful defense led to advancement of the writer from the status of student first to rank of master,then to doctor, with the rights and privileges that were part of those stations in life.

Artisans and craftsmen had organized to keep their skills from becoming the property of everyone, thus protecting their livelihoods. They systematized the preparation of new specialists by enforcing a sequence of training leading from apprenticeship to the status of master. Preparation of a masterpiece, a work that was judged worthy of the name by a jury of masters, signaled the successful conclusion of training.

As academic centers emerged, and as a sequence of study evolved, the thesis and the dissertation became the capstones of successive levels of achievement. The model, probably borrowed from the guilds of artisans and craftsmen, spread. The masters and the doctorate became identifying symbols. For example, in the early fourteenth century in Bologna , a candidate for the Doctor of Law degree had to take two examinations-a private one and, later, a public one in the cathedal. The private examination was conducted by the faculty of doctors.

THE EMERGENCE OF RESEARCH IN THE PROFESSIONS

Every contemporary profession was, in its beginning stages, made up of a number of separate individuals operating with a loosely knit group of common skills, responsibilities, and assumptions. The group was held together only by social sanctions. As each profession’s central core of functions crystallized, a body of laws and customs developed that institutionalized the activities of the profession. At the same time, the members usually organized and took steps to define their roles even further, particularly with respect to two considerations: ethical behavior toward their clients and toward each other, and protection of the public from charlatans.

These evolutionary steps had different points of origin for different professions. For law in America the start was in the period 1775-1780. For educators in the United States , professionalization started around 1850. The first call for a school to train social workers arose in 1894. Before then, little theoretical or empirical writing had appeared about the standards, teaching, financing, objectives, and substance of professional education.

During the second half of the 19th century, an empirical base for many of today’s professions began to develop. Books, journals, and state and federal publications carried the material. Virtually all investigations, though, dealt with matters that could be approached by the collection of factual data, examining the data in terms of totals, ranges, averages, and percentages. Ideas about professional practice continued to achieve acceptance or rejection on the basis of their logical or emotional appeal to the public and to persons in authority. Not until the new century began did actual field-testing of new concepts start to rival debate in determining the efficacy of professional practices.

The enthusiasm for science that characterized the Western world at the turn of the century had a decided impact. The idea of a scientific base for the professions began to be taken seriously. The science adherents came from a variety of academic disciplines. They had in common a conviction about the paramount importance of seeking quantifiable evidence, deriving principles, and testing the principles by additional investigations.

The investigative procedures advocated by science-minded members of the professions came, naturally enough, from the various academic disciplines in which they had been trained. They added techniques devised to suit the questions they sought to resolve. The additions ranged from the questionnaire, the rating scale, the controlled experiment, and the case study to the complex set of procedures used in surveys of entire societal units (i.e., communities, school systems, cultures, and nations).

Theses and dissertations on topics related more to the professional disciplines than to the academic disciplines grew in number each year. So did the number of practicing professionals familiar with research procedures. But the formal training of individuals for careers in professional research moved forward more slowly.

During the first three quarters of the 20th century, the newly trained professors who elected to work in professional schools became more and more separated from the professors in the academic disciplines, including the disciplines that had generated most of the “pro-fession-oriented” professors. During that same timespan, the training of persons to conduct investigative studies on “professional” topics became largely a function of faculty in the professional schools. More and more often, the professional disciplines found themselves almost completely separated from the main bodies of their parent academic disciplines (e.g., social work from sociology and public affairs from political science).

Certainly, this altered the nature of the THESIS AND DISSERTATION work. The investigations of both faculty members and students who recognized their primary engagement in professional preparation edged toward a more operational, practice-oriented mode than the studies conducted by the faculties and students in the arts and sciences. The same trend appeared even in professional preparation programs which often remained housed in university academic departments, such as speech pathology and audiology, clinical psychology, economics, theater, dance, studio arts, music, and journalism.

The widening separation of the professions from the academic disciplines showed in the increasingly pragmatic stances of the for-mer, as contrasted with the more abstract devotion to knowledge for its own sake in the latter. There were exceptions, of course; some leaders managed to straddle the gap. But the rapid growth in the availability of schooling and the public demand for high standards of human services, coupled with accelerated professionalization, exerted powerful socioeducational forces. Among other things, these forces influenced scholarship in professional schools to increase serious efforts to develop professional preparation, with its own theoretical base, and to construct a body of knowledge and practice that would define the profession. The movement accelerated, too, under the influence of the steady and widespread growth in empiricism in most of the Western world’s cultures and by increasingly sophisticated utilization of statistical analysis of data in all sectors of society.

The impact of these factors in combination was strong. By mid-century, empirical research methods dominated. Virtually all advanced degrees in the professions required the study of statistical procedures for data analysis. Research departments developed in professional schools not so much to conduct research as to teach graduate students to understand and use designs and data-analysis procedures for empirical studies with the greatest feasible degree of control of variables. Acceptable research came to be identified by the procedures taught by the research departments of their particular schools. The definition of “respectability” in many professional schools was to do a THESIS AND DISSERTATION that employed some form of a controlled experimental design and subjected its data to a complex statistical analysis.

RECENT AND CURRENT TRENDS IN THESIS AND DISSERTATION INVESTIGATIONS

The late 1950s saw the development of a noticeable negative reaction to the attitude that any professional discipline could build a theoretical and conceptual base securely founded on a narrowly conceived underpinning of research design and research methodology. Some professional-school faculty members had pressed for a broader interpretation all along. Their students carried out surveys, conducted polls and case studies, did retrospective project evaluation, analyzed the impact of laws on practices, studied development processes, and in countless other ways asserted the importance of a wider range of methodologies and technologies of investigation. That reaction appears by now to have approached a balance with the earlier, narrower point of view. Contributions to the different knowledge bases for the various professions are at present welcomed from many directions. Recently added dimensions in investigations are found, for example, in the widespread interest in qualitative research and in the development of systems of evaluation. Today’s THESIS AND DISSERTATION student in either an academic or a professional discipline has unprecedented latitude in choice of subject and methodology.