Making Your Doctoral Research Project Ambitious

Developing Large-Scale Studies with Real-World Impact

Nadia Siddiqui, Stephen Gorard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000572636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This book presents the doctoral dissertation process as not just a way of getting a qualification or even a method of learning how to do research better, but as a substantial and significant piece of research in its own right. The book will inspire current and prospective PhD scholars to take up ambitious and large-scale study projects, dedicating this most important time to a worthy piece of research.

This edited collection provides real and outstanding examples of multiple research design methodologies which will allow doctoral researchers to develop a wide set of research skills, leading to the development of a high-quality academic thesis from which peer reviewed research papers and books can emerge. Each main chapter presents the summary of a doctoral thesis, followed by focused aspects from the projects where the contributors highlight the development of a research design, the process involved in executing the design, and present selected findings with their implications. Each chapter concludes with the researchers' experiences of learning through this journey and the implications of the process for the development of the discipline and their own career.

Ideal reading for doctoral students and supervisors, this book is a source of encouragement and motivation for new researchers seeking to challenge general perceptions in the social sciences that PhD or other doctoral research projects must be small-scale rather trivial studies, but can instead produce robust findings that have real-world implications.

Chapter 1 Thinking bigger: The importance of an ambitious doctoral research project

Nadia Siddiqui and Stephen Gorard

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201366-1

Introduction

This is a book about worthwhile doctoral research projects. It is intended for new researchers of all kinds – those completing or thinking about a PhD, and those in their first research appointment. New researchers include Masters’ students doing a dissertation, because the same pleas for ambition and clarity in research that are made in this book apply to them as well. We are also addressing doctoral supervisors looking for examples or advice. In fact, the book will be of interest to researchers at all stages, although the main focus, and all of the case study examples, concern doctoral researchers.

We hope that the words of the 17 new researchers in the substantive chapters of this book will be a source of encouragement and motivation for other new researchers. We want to encourage you to be ambitious and realistic, to use multiple approaches, larger datasets, simple analyses, and clear uncluttered reporting, to produce relatively robust findings that have real-world implications.

What is a doctoral degree?

The number of people studying for a doctoral degree (a PhD, DPhil or a professional doctorate like an EdD) is increasing across all disciplines, worldwide. In the UK, doctoral admissions and completions have increased annually for at least ten years. UK universities attract one of the largest proportions of doctoral researchers, locally and from across the globe. In 2019, UK universities awarded 101,885 doctorates. These new researchers can make important contributions to the research environment of UK higher education (HE), and that of their home countries.

The UK Higher Education Statistics Agency states that a PhD (or equivalent doctorate) is the highest level of standard degree offered by a university (Higher Education Statistics Agency HESA, 2018). There are many different formats for a research doctorate. They can be full-time (usually three or four years), part-time (usually five to seven years), or a mixture of the two. Some will include compulsory training in research, while others like the professional doctorates may have substantive modules as well, with assignments similar to a Master's degree that have to be completed before beginning the research dissertation. Some actually incorporate a Master's degree, such as an MPhil awarded after one or two years.

In some countries the doctorate is awarded for a thematic collection of new research articles. In the UK, this format of PhD by publication is possible, especially for staff already working in a university. Some doctorates are a combination of coursework and new research. There are also different traditions by subject area or discipline. However, most doctorates involve submitting a long (perhaps 50,000 to 120,000 words) thesis, based on original research, for independent evaluation by a set of examiners. This has been standard for all of our PhD students.

This book focuses on doctorates of this format, which is the most common in the social sciences. However, there is no evidence suggesting that the quality of research undertaken or the training given to new researchers needs to vary because of the precise format of their doctoral studies (Evans et al., 2018; Smaldone et al., 2019). The key to all doctorates, this highest qualification, is generally thought to be the quality of research they report. A successful doctorate should mean that a researcher has met the criteria of submitting an original research piece, examined and passed in a viva voce examination led by a selected academic examiner who is independent of the student's institutional affiliation (Quality Assurance Agency QAA, 2020).

The importance of doctoral research

Doing a doctorate by research is expensive, in terms of fees paid to the institution, accommodation and subsistence for three years or more, maybe the cost of books, and fieldwork expenses. There is also the salary foregone, given that you could have had a job instead. Part-time doctorates permit students to hold a full-time job simultaneously, and the longer elapsed time to complete the thesis should permit the student to plan more ambitious longitudinal projects. However, part-time degrees take longer, are somewhat harder work than the full-time doctorate, and are still very expensive.

Therefore, this chance to conduct your own research should not be spurned by doing something mediocre or worse. A doctoral degree such as a PhD is an excellent opportunity to dedicate three or more years to conducting a substantial research project. This is perhaps the only time in people's lives where such an extended period is possible for just one research project, which they can focus on exclusively and write about at comparative leisure. Academics rarely, if ever, get that experience again. It would be a wasted opportunity for new researchers if this time were not spent in conducting some high quality research, which could make a substantial knowledge contribution, add value to academic practice, and enhance their own skills for further development or a career.

Picking a supervisor

A small part of achieving the above is to pick an appropriate supervisor. The obvious standard advice is to select a supervisor, and a department and university, that match your intended research study in terms of focus and research expertise (Mangematin, 2000). This alignment of your ideas with the ongoing research conducted by a PhD supervisor is considered an important determinant of successful PhD admission and completion (van Rooij et al., 2021). It is certainly how funders like the ESRC begin to judge who to fund (NINEDTP, 2021). We agree. But only up to a point. Beware the expert in your area of interest who will not let you do what you want, or who will stop you moving the field forward in a way that might be seen as undermining their own prior research (or their pet theories!). Some experts are possessive, insistent on you using the same methods approaches as they do, regardless of your research interests. Some will constrain you just because they know little or nothing of methods approaches other than a small sub-set. But in social science research, you have to own the project. The supervisor is there to guide you gently, provide robust critique when needed and, most importantly, to provide craft tips drawn from their own experiences.

Naturally, potential doctoral researchers can have a wide variety of reasons for choosing to do a PhD (or similar). These may include interest in the topic, career progression, or even putting off paid work! But most are interested, at least partly, in a more advanced level of academic experience (than a Bachelors’ or Masters’ degree provides), and professional development as a researcher (Skakni, 2018). These motivations mean that the supervisor has to be a successful researcher themselves to perform the supervisory role fully. And the supervisor has to know about and have used a wider range of methods approaches successfully, so that they can help convey the important skills and experiences to their mentees (see Chapter 19). This match-up is reflected in the longstanding evidence that the main contributors to high impact “prestigious” peer-reviewed journals are PhD graduates from “prestigious” universities (Perry, 1994). This is, at least partly, because these universities tend to have more research active staff members available to supervise students in their own mould (although there will be other differences as well, including perhaps more undergraduate workload pressure in less research active universities).

Nevertheless, all other things being equal, we recommend choosing the most research active supervisory team you can find, almost regardless of institution. New researchers should expect to learn in an active research environment where they can advance their knowledge of conducting research. And such higher level academic participation means that PhD researchers will learn to think bigger in their selection of research topics on social issues, and so design PhD projects with findings that have relevance for policy and practice. Thinking bigger in the conception and design of a project means constructing a feasible, pragmatic research question, designing an innovative research plan, and conducting a robust study with ambitious ideas for marshalling or collecting data. This level of confidence and ambition is contrary to much general advice on “how to do your PhD”.

For at least twenty years in the UK, as elsewhere, there has been an increased focus on the skills of supervisors, and the skills that the supervisors and HE training modules can impart to students (Park, 2005; Roberts Report, 2002). Again, we do not argue with this trend. But the “skills” often referred to are supervisory rather than research ones. There is a danger that all of the training in how to be supervisor, how to record your meetings, and the need for supervisory certification, will tend to de-emphasise the importance of actual research experience. And overshadow the necessity for supervisors able to do high quality research so that they can help their students to do the same.

The official lists of requirements for PhD supervisors tend to be quite long, and being research active appears only once (e.g. Taylor and Clegg, 2021). Of course, no one is born as an experienced supervisor or researcher. This is why we referred to supervisory teams above. Most universities now arrange for two (sometimes more) supervisors, and this is a good idea for continuity in the unexpected absence of one of them. It also means that new members of staff can be paired with more experienced ones. As an example, Nadia Siddiqui was once the PhD student of Stephen Gorard. Subsequently, her first supervision of her own doctoral students was with Stephen Gorard. She is now a very experienced and promoted researcher in her own right. She is also in demand as an external examiner for others, worldwide.

The work in this book

This book presents chapters summarising the work of 17 PhD or EdD researchers, supervised by the two of us (sometimes with our valued colleague Professor Beng Huat See). These doctorates took place during our time at Durham University, UK (although some earlier students completed their studies at the University of Birmingham, UK). These examples are just the latest in a longer line, and a selection from a larger set, stretching back to the late 1990s. Their projects, and others like them, clearly demonstrate that PhD research can be successful. They are based on large-scale rich studies, with suitable research designs, robust findings, and they have made or will make a substantial contribution to knowledge in their field.

The quality of research exemplified here is based on studying real issues, using appropriate research designs, high quality data, the simplest of analyses, and clarity in writing for meaningful and readable research outputs. The findings from these projects also illustrate the benefit of collecting a variety of data including numbers, experiences, perceptions, images, and observations (only some of which are outlined in these brief chapter summaries). Unfortunately, these inclusive characteristics are not always visible in much academic research, let alone in doctoral studies.

There is often too great an emphasis in research methods training, and in materials advising PhD researchers, on the use of grand theoretical conceptions, or on the reflexivity of the researcher. As can be seen, the chapters in this book are genuinely reflective about their PhD journeys, and they evaluate important theoretical ideas such as what “effectiveness” or “fairness” are, or whether resilience or morality are malleable characteristics of people. The studies are both empirically and theoretically strong. But none have wasted time and words discussing paradigms wars, and epistemological and ontological dispositions, or justifying their “positionality” as a researcher of a certain type (see Chapter 19).

All of these researchers have completed their thesis in around three years (or equivalent for part-time), or are well on track to do so. A few completed in substantially less time, and a few went slightly into a fourth year. These emerging researchers mostly had no research funding for fieldwork expenses or similar, and many had to complete their studies during the COVID-19 worldwide lockdown. They certainly did not have it easy. Several chapters explain how the authors overcame challenges such as limited resources and barriers to data access. For example, everyone doing fieldwork, or using secondary data, in England had to pass a disclosure and barring service (DBS) check. Those using sensitive data had to take official training and pass a test to use the ONS Secure Research Service.

In general though, our experience of supervision and mentoring suggests that high quality studies like these examples are the actually easiest to complete, because they generate substantial content for the write up. The new researchers who struggle the most to write up their studies are generally the ones who have the least to say. This leads to the deplorable habit, widespread among academics, of filling their writing spaces with what read like pompous and verbose utterances instead. And which are not really research at all. This is what we want to help others to avoid.

The book contains research from educational contexts in China, England, Finland, Hungary, Lebanon, the Maldives, the Netherlands, Turkey and Thailand, and work by authors from India, and Saudi Arabia (courageously researching in the educational context of the UK). It is impressive that the international scholars have written their theses in English, and we have preserved as far as possible their sometimes unique form of expression, even though this means that the writing style is not always strictly consistent with English academic writing practices. Several students were awarded scholarships from their home countries, and most of these were bonded to return home and use their new skills there. Some others, who were self-funding, received help with research costs from their colleges at Durham University. If you do not ask you will not get! The researchers from England were funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). This prestigious funding covers the fees, some expenses, and usually pays a stipend, all of which are invaluable.

Most of the authors here have published from their PhD research, some before their viva, and others soon after. A few have already produced a book or research monograph based on their doctorate, and others are arranging to do so at present. They have also presented at national and international conferences, written blogs, sent evidence to government committees, and talked in teacher forums. Some have had their research featured in the press or on TV and radio. These are all excellent things to do to engage with the widest possible academic and user audience. As supervisors, we helped them in all of these endeavours, reading drafts, editing texts, suggesting outlets, and offering strong reassurance when some early versions were rejected or ignored. The latter happens to all of us.

However, none of these often very prestigious publications names either of us as authors. Our contributions were as supervisors, which is what we are employed for (and what the students paid their fees for). We are aware that traditions vary by discipline, but we generally abhor the practice of supervisors muscling in on their students’ (Masters’ or doctoral) own publications just because they helped with the research or the writing (Krauth et al., 2017; Xu, 2020). We think more should be made of ethical concerns about this intellectual piracy (Kwok, 2005; Macfarlane, 2017). One piece of practical advice for potential research students – find a supervisor who will not be desperate to use your outputs in order to shore up their own CV.

The structure of the book

Following the introduction chapter, this book is divided into three parts, each containing relevant chapters on linked educational themes. The book ends with a chapter in which we offer advice on what we have learnt from supervising these excellent doctoral projects. We present the implications f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Editor Bios
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Thinking bigger: The importance of an ambitious doctoral research project
• Part I: Educational Effectiveness
• Part II: Educational Improvement
• Part III: Evaluating Education Policy
• Conclusion
• Index