2 Days to Intro!

My self-imposed deadline of getting the first draft of my doctoral thesis Chapter 1: Introduction, Background, & Theoretical Framework (tentative title) is only 2 days away, and while I am on schedule for completing it, I have a few late nights ahead of me. As this process is around an original contribution to the literature, it is not possible to follow a formal, universal structure for what exactly gets included in this chapter. Let’s face it, how much can really be in an introduction without it’s actually being solid content of some sort?

With this said, I want to share a strategy I found useful–I located about a dozen doctoral theses using the same methodology I am planning to use (narrative inquiry), and isolated the various tables of content so I can see how people organized their work and named their sections / chapters. While most of the doctoral theses / dissertations contained a number of the points of content (intro, design, data collection, presentation, etc.), the ways they organized these parts and holistically fit them together all differed. Nothing like getting an overview of how others (who finished!) pulled their work together. While my supervisors will ultimately agree or disagree with me (and provide guidance), I want to try to get it together in my own informed way first.

Anyway, back to writing . . .