PhD Dissertation Help: Hints for empirical Work

No matter what approach you use for your PhD dissertation, you will use empirical analysis to complete your work. Depending on your specialization, your dissertation may best fit an empirical approach.

The focus of your paper will determine what type and amount of empirical work you will need. For instance, if your discipline is in the physical sciences, you will likely need to support your thesis using empirical data.

Take for example if you plan on focusing your dissertation on the effects of climate change. You could take a theoretical approach if your PhD is in the social sciences. You could examine the effects of political speech on the perceptions of climate change among voters.

While your paper will entail proposing a theory based on social behaviors and reactions, you may choose to gather evidence of societal views based on a variety of surveys and polls conducted by others and draw your conclusions based on that. Or you may conduct your own research studies to gather that evidence, but the results of those polls and surveys is the empirical data that will go into your work.

On the other hand, if you’ve determined that the focus of your dissertation will be based mostly on data, empirical evidence related to the science of climate change, then you will be producing an empirical dissertation.

Here are some hints for empirical work:

  • A PhD dissertation that is primarily data driven will require more empirical work than a mostly theoretical approach. So while a theoretical dissertation of climate change will include the use of empirical data, a scientific examination of climate change will drive the conclusion of your thesis based largely on the empirical work that you do.
  • If most of the research done for your dissertation uses empirical data, you are writing from an empirical approach. Observational studies that are included in your paper, whether conducted by you or analyzed from other research related to your topic will require empirical work to support your thesis.
  • Empirical work can be accomplished in a number of ways. Surveys, polls, laboratory work and behavioral observations are all ways to produce empirical work.

Remember, while your dissertation may be written from a theoretical approach, you will still need to do some empirical work to support your conclusions. The amount and type of empirical work is determined by the type of data required to argue your thesis.

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