Authoring a PhD Thesis How to Plan, Draft, Write and Finish a Doctoral Dissertation by Patrick Dunleavy

ahead to get things finished up somehow. My last chapter

contains the little bit of post hocrationalization of my

results [or rethinking of my opening perspective] that

I managed to scrape together during a very rushed final

drafting stage.

There are multiple reasons why this kind of disappointingly
familiar storyline recurs so frequently and predictably with doc-
torates. One of the most important of these influences is that
many people in the humanities and social sciences regard the
‘focus down’ model of how a doctorate should be structured as
either a natural or desirable or inevitable way to do things.
Figure 3.2 shows the kind of sequence adopted by nine out of
ten research students doing ‘big book’ theses in Europe in these
disciplines, and often demanded by their supervisors. The order
of material is shown along the horizontal axis from left to right,
and the horizontal width of each block shows the weight of
words assigned to that chunk of the thesis. The vertical size for
each block shows the scope of the material or topics (the
breadth of coverage) being considered at that stage.
The focus down model starts with a very broad literature
review that progressively gets winnowed down as it goes on.
A set of related big themes are raised initially, discussed super-
ficially but then often set to the side one by one, or discarded

PLANNING AN INTEGRATED THESIS◆ 55

More review,

methods and

set-up

materials

Analysis

Large

literature

review CORE

Breadth of coverage

sequence of chapters

Figure 3.2 The focus down model