writing my proposed research design section

this week, i focused most specifically on work on the research design section of my dissertation proposal.  i did quite a bit of writing on sunday and came up with a strong first draft of my research design, which my classmates and i talked a lot about on tuesday night.  they offered such great and helpful feedback and asked a lot of questions which helped me to deepen my thinking on writing this piece.  then, on wednesday, my chair and i talked about the same piece and she helped to push my thinking even further along.  all in all, it has been a really excellent process and i look forward to spending more time working on it (and on the rest of my proposal) this weekend.

there were two things that really helped me as i planned to write this piece.  the first is something i read in maxwell (2012) in which he describes qualitative research design as having four parts:

1. research relationships
2. setting and participant selection
3. data collection
4. data analysis

he writes quite a bit more about this on page 90 of his 2012 book.  i liked thinking about it in this way because it helped me to give my research relationships quite a bit more thought and space in my proposal.  for me, this piece on relationships is fundamental to my design decisionmaking, and reading maxwell helped me to keep this piece in.

second, a couple of weeks ago, sharon talked in class about breaking up one's research questions into concepts/constructs and taking the time to define and better understand those constructs in the context of one's work.  this was really helpful to me as i looked back on my questions and their relationship to my research design.  around that same time, my chair amy suggested that i create a chart with three columns: research question, data source/s, and data analysis.  combining these two ways of thinking about my questions and their relationships to my data really helped me to fill in the gaps between questions and data sources.

for me, these two pieces pushed me quite a bit further in my thinking and writing this past week.  i have all of the feedback and notes from my classmates and chair gathered together and i'm really looking forward to sorting them out, really thinking through them, and doing a heavy load of writing this weekend.  i can't wait!