We may have qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods in dissertations. This blog will elaborate on quantitative dissertations, qualitative dissertations, and mixed methods dissertations by addressing their similarities and differences.
We may have qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods in dissertations. Therefore, this blog will elaborate on quantitative dissertations, qualitative dissertations, and mixed methods dissertations by addressing their similarities and differences.
Using the word quantitative does not mean that the dissertation must have quantitative research methods or statistical analysis techniques. Quantitative research deals with addressing research questions, hypotheses, or both. This research type relates to establishing a research strategy, concluding results, and making inferences. Classic investigations involve replication-based studies, theory-driven research, and data-driven dissertations. Nonetheless, many core characteristics pertain to quantitative dissertations regardless of the particular route you adopt on a quantitative dissertation.
They build on or test theories. These may include adopting an original or comprehensive approach with replication or modification.
They address quantitative research questions and test research hypotheses by rejecting or failure to reject the null hypothesis.
Positivist or post-positivist research paradigms affect them heavily.
They can have descriptive, experimental, quasi-experimental, or relationship-based research designs.
They resort to utilizing probability sampling techniques, generalizing from the sample to a broader population. In contrast, they may have to apply non-probability sampling techniques.
Research methods produce quantitative data (e.g., data sets, laboratory-based methods, questionnaires/surveys, structured interviews, and structured observation).
They depend on statistical analysis techniques while examining the data collected, irrespective of their descriptive or inferential structure.
They check the findings’ reliability and internal and external validity and may provide confidence intervals for the population parameters.
Statements, data, tables, and graphs are used to report their findings addressing each research question, hypothesis, or both.
Conclusions align with the findings, research questions, hypotheses, or both, and theories test or expand on extant ideas or provide insight for future approaches.
Qualitative dissertations involve qualitative research methods such as unstructured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation. As they use research methods not employed in quantitative dissertations, qualitative research is beyond a choice between research methods. Qualitative research regards the research process differently by establishing research questions, developing and utilizing theory, choosing a research strategy, and presenting and discussing research findings in a substantially unique way. Thus, qualitative dissertations will have a distinct approach, relying on the specific route you adopt (for example, case study research compared to ethnographies). The traditional ways are autoethnography, case study, ethnographies, grounded theory, narrative, and phenomenological research. Nonetheless, whatever path you pursue, many broad characteristics relate to qualitative dissertations:
They are considered emergent designs, implying that the research process, and sometimes even the qualitative research questions you handle, often develop during the dissertation process.
They employ many ways to tackle the theory - sometimes capitalizing on theory to assist the research process; in other times, utilizing it to develop new theoretical insights. They sometimes use both techniques. However, the goal is seldom to test a particular theory from the outset.
Many research paradigms support them, including interpretivism, constructivism, and critical theory.
They pursue research designs that radically affect your choices during the research process and the analysis and discussion of findings. Such research designs substantially vary based on the approach taken, whether autoethnography, case study research, ethnography, grounded theory, narrative research, and phenomenological research.
They employ theoretical sampling - non-probability sampling techniques – to explore cases most fit to address their research questions.
They study people in their natural settings by using multiple research methods. This process generates qualitative data involving unstructured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation.
They interpret the qualitative data from the researcher’s perspective and employ an inductive method to specific themes or abstractions, establishing a holistic/gestalt picture of the study.
They assess their findings’ quality concerning their dependability, confirmability, conformability, and transferability.
They elaborate on their findings primarily using personal accounts, case studies, and narratives. Moreover, they employ other means of describing themes or abstracts, processes, observations, and contradictions to address research questions.
They deliberate the theoretical mainly from the findings via the research questions and deduce tentative conclusions.
Many reasons exist to include mixed methods in thesis and dissertations. Mixed methods dissertations use both qualitative and quantitative approaches in research. Although they are increasingly used with a more profound legitimacy, their components have not been adequately addressed. One can better tackle a research question by gathering qualitative and quantitative data, analyzing or interpreting them individually or in combination, and conducting multiple research phases. Thus, it is critical to perform qualitative research to investigate an issue and unearth primary themes before employing quantitative analysis to assess the relationships between them.
Mixed methods often confront challenges because qualitative and quantitative research substantially vary structure-wise. They may even be said to oppose. Hence, when having a mixed methods dissertation, you should be careful about the goals of your research and must decide whether the qualitative or quantitative components are more crucial in philosophical, theoretical, and practical terms and whether they can be combined or kept separate.
Editing and proofreading your dissertation is exceedingly crucial. A professional editing and proofreading service has trained, experienced experts with PhD in their fields and will edit your work without prejudice. Their suggestions will make the dissertation or thesis more legible and practical. Another set of eyes can check your dissertation much better than you as they can readily find mistakes or areas that need fine-tuning. In academic writing, editing and proofreading ensure the credibility of the content. Many mistakes concerning grammar, punctuation, syntax, sentence construction and other minor errors are amended. An expert who will amend such mistakes will save time and ensure consistency and error-free writing for your thesis or dissertation.
How to Structure a Dissertation: A Brief Guide
Dissertation Submission Checklist: 5 Important Tips
How to Layout and Format a Dissertation: 10 Tips
How to Choose a Dissertation Editor in 3 Steps
A Step-by-Step Guide on Writing and Structuring Your Dissertation
Visit our order page if you want our subject-area editors or language experts to work on your manuscript to improve its tone and style and give it a perfect academic tone and style through proper editing and proofreading. The process of submitting a paper is very easy and quick. Click here to find out how it works.
Our pricing is based on the type of service you avail of here, be it editing or proofreading. We charge on the basis of the word count of your manuscript that you submit for editing and proofreading and the turnaround time it takes to get it done. If you want to get an instant price quote for your project, copy and paste your document or enter your word count into our pricing calculator.
Contact us to get support with academic editing and proofreading. We have a 24/7 active live chat mode to offer you direct support along with qualified editors to refine and furbish your manuscript.
Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Medium.
For more posts, click here.
This brief guide elaborates on quantitative dissertations, qualitative dissertations, and mixed methods dissertations by addressing their similarities and differences. To give you an opportunity to practice proofreading, we have left a few spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors in the text. See if you can spot them! If you spot the errors correctly, you will be entitled to a 10% discount.
How to Determine Variability in a Dataset
14.10.2023
How to Determine Central Tendency
19.02.2023
How to Specify Study Variables in Research Papers?
14.01.2023
Population vs Sample | Sampling Methods for a Dissertation
14.01.2023
7 Issues to Avoid That may Dent the Quality of Thesis Writing
18.12.2022
How to Ensure the Quality of Academic Writing in a Thesis and Dissertation?
04.12.2022
How to Define Population and Sample in a Dissertation?
03.12.2022
Discussion chapter of a PhD thesis focuses on explaining and analyzing what you have researched, presenting how it is associated with the existing literature. It is also a place for argument supporting your entire discussion. We often find that people seek thesis writing help from experienced editing and proofreading services to prepare a flawless PhD discussion chapter. However, following 9 essential tips can help you design a perfect PhD thesis with an excellent discussion chapter.
Continue Reading
One of the main things that any editor or proofreader looks out for while editing a piece of text is punctuation marks. The reason is simple — they can alter the meaning of your text if you do not use them correctly. It becomes even more prominent when you are writing an academic paper. In academic writing, an author may be easily misunderstood when ambiguous sentences are used. Punctuation marks mainly serve the purpose to disambiguate sentences. While literary or other types of writing will have a certain degree of freedom for using punctuation marks, academic work needs to be precise and correct. This article will cover the importance of punctuation marks in academic writing.
Continue Reading
One of the major struggles that English speakers and writers suffer from is the different variants of American English and British English. Mistakes regarding these variants are very common that even experts get confused at times. Therefore, if you are struggling with these differences, don’t worry — you are not alone. Now, what you can do is gradually learn more about the two English variants. We assembled a comprehensive guide that highlights the basic differences between American and British English.
Continue Reading
If you are just starting with academic writing, you may feel overwhelmed by the pressure that academic writing usually imposes. However, as demanding as it may seem, you can easily master academic writing if you know the right rules to follow. This article particularly reaches out to beginners in academic writing to help you master this form of writing. Here, we will go through the basic language rules that apply to all kinds of academic writing (generally) and will help you master it in no time.
Continue Reading
The American Psychological Association (APA) introduced the 7th edition of the APA Publication Manual in October 2019. This edition replaced the previous one, the 6th edition of the manual. Since then, several things have changed. The latest edition also updated the formatting of digital object identifiers (DOI) in APA Style. This article addresses when to include DOIs and uniform resource locators (URLs) in APA Style references.
Continue Reading