Surviving Your Dissertation: A Comprehensive Guide to Content and Process
Rudestam, Kjell Erik. 1992. Surviving Your Dissertation: A Comprehensive Guide to Content and Process. Newbury Park, Calif: SAGE.
Rating:
8
Summary:
As you might suspect from the title, this book covers the process of writing a dissertation in the social sciences. It is geared primarily toward psychologists and sociologists, but anyone in the social sciences will find the book of use. The chapters cover the basic sections of a PhD dissertation, including: Introduction, Literature Review, Statement of the Problem, Methods and Data, Results, and Discussion. The authors detail what belongs in each chapter and include a variety of helpful hints and bits of advice throughout to improve the quality of your writing.
After covering the basics of writing the dissertation chapters, the book then turns to some to basic writing suggestions for social scientists. The authors cover table construction, how to detail statistical results, and also talk about different software programs that can be useful in the process of conducting and writing up social scientific research.
Review:
I found this book useful, but I’m certain that has to do with the fact that I am currently working on a dissertation in sociology. The clear explanation of what belongs in each dissertation chapter was useful, as were some of the other suggestions the authors made. However, I would recommend that anyone considering starting a PhD program read this at the beginning of the process rather than halfway through writing your dissertation. The suggestions in the book are very informative, but also something you are likely to glean just by going through the process. For instance, I didn’t start my graduate program annotating articles using an article citation program. About a year into things, however, I became aware of the utility of such software and now use it religiously. I guess what I’m saying is that you probably won’t learn a whole lot from this book if you’re already working on your dissertation and have completed all your course work – in all likelihood you’ve learned everything they try to teach in this book the hard way: through experience.
If you want a bit of insight into what writing a social scientific dissertation is like, this is a good book to pick up. But, read it before you start your program instead of near the tail-end (like I did); what they have to say is relevant for the entire process, not just the dissertation.