How does one write a thesis in a non-science degree?

Factual Questions
1

I’m currently in grad school for engineering, and the general process for people in an engineering or “hard” science major (bio, chem, physics, etc…) is to design and run an experiment that proves something, discovers something, reinforces something, etc… in your field. It’s a long process, especially since the experiments never go right, and have to be done again, and again, and again, and again, etc…For a doctorate degree, the experiments and thesis/dissertation have to be even more involved and important.

But what about people getting a soclal science or arts degree? It just seems to me, as an outsider looking in, that there theses (is that the right plural?) can’t take nearly as much time or work. I mean, sure, if you’re an English major maybe you read all the book by a certain author and write a thesis on the underlying theme of <blank> during the <blankity> age, but to me that seems so much different from running an actual, factual, experiment and collecting data that I have a hard time seeing why it might take as much time to do.

So help me fight my ignorance and not look upon fine arts and social science degress as being worth less than mine. :stuck_out_tongue:

(I kid, I kid.)

2

My husband is now more than ten years ABD in performance studies (help me, Lord!). Please don’t ask me what performance studies is. I don’t have one flippin’ clue. Anyhow, for his dissertation, he has to read basically everything every written on his topic and then write something completely new and innovative which draws from everything written before it. A new theory of how <subject> affects our lives through the lens of performance studies.

Of course, the longer he stalls, the more gets written that he has to read to make sure he’s still being original. 10 years ago, his field was one that maybe 6 people were writing on. Now it’s like the trendy topic du jour and Borders has a whole freackin’ section on it. But that’s another rant.

Basically, it’s the same as it is for you - see what everyone else has said, figure out something new and say that, supported by your own research. His research is with newspapers, television, movies, other media, personal interviews and field work, yours is in the laboratory.

3

I’m a sociology major and for grad degrees they have to complete their own research, much like science degrees. My current professor did hers in Java, had to collect a crap-load of data by surveys, interviews, any other way she could think of. She ended up living there for 2 years, not even counting her work before that in grad school and compiling all of that data into a reasonable thesis, and writing the dissertation. Took 9 years all told, I believe she told us.

Don’t knock social science degrees, man.

4

Well I’m not all the clear on the Arts, but with the Social Sciences you’re doing research just the same as the hard sciences. Just because you aren’t mixing chemicals in test tubes or…whatever it is that you engineers do, doesn’t mean there isn’t a huge degree of hypothesizing, data collection, scientific method, and experimentation to (in your words) “prove something, discover something, reinforce something, etc.”

5

My wife has a Master’s in Elementary Reading. Her Thesis was rather exhaustive to do, as it seems they all are. It involved research and field study work. Then analysis of said field studies. ( I had to videotape her DOING the student testing to prove how many times it was done, with how many kids, etc. )

She wrote a bang-up Thesis that was readable by the average schmo, and makes its argument very persuasively.

Cartooniverse

6

My doctorate is in a small and new subfield of linguistics. It is gaining popularity–more in the corporate world than the academic–and there are several approaches to it, but only about ten people that take my particular approach. I worked in the area for the time I was getting my other graduate work done (I started as an undergrad, actually) and when I’d finished jumping through all the other hoops, I sat down and wrote about everything I’d learned in the area. I guess my thesis was analogous to an electrical engineer working with a new kind of circuit, who, after several years of working with it, sits down and writes everything he’s learned as a practical how-to guide.

They passed the thesis with no revisions, so I guess it was okay.

7

For Classics and Ancient History (what I know about personally) you have to, as WhyNot said, read the history of scholarship in your area and make an ‘original contribution’. This can mean editing a new text, collating new discoveries (eg in archaeology and papyrology), or simply a new explanatory model for something that appears in the evidence; trying to ‘solve a problem’ but in a different way, obviously, than science. Maybe you try to answer the question, ‘Why was x such a commonly used phrase in this poet?’ or ‘How did this poet structure his books?’ or ‘what is the function of recorded silence in acts of the Roman senate and church councils?’ or ‘Why did the x community in 3rd century Gaul leave inscriptions in this format?’ or ‘How was the Battle of Adrianopolis fought?’ or… and so on.

Also, you have to know, at least, Latin, Ancient Greek, German and French. And probably Italian.

Will it save the world? No, but it will advance the scholarship in the field.

8

In my creative writing program, you wrote a novel (or a book of short stories) for your thesis.

9

If I had stuck with literature, I would have wanted to do a thesis or dissertation on humor in British writing. I think there are commonalities that can be seen from P.G. Wodehouse all the way through Frank Parking and Doug Adams. I have no difficulty at all in seeing how that could run into a huge amount of research and analysis.

Basically, it’s the same thing you guys sometimes do–come up with a new approach, or a new way of looking at something, and write about it.

10

um, that was Frank Parkin I meant, not Parking. He was the one who wrote the novel Krippendorf’s Tribe, which by all accounts is much better than the recent movie.

11

Actually, it’s just the other way around. Completing a doctoral degree in the hard sciences usually takes significantly less time than in the humanities and social sciences. See this NSF report for details.

Not all of that time difference is concentrated in the actual requirements of the thesis research, of course; for one thing, humanities students often get less financial support and thus have to spend more time on teaching and other employment while enrolled. But there are a number of other factors that make thesis work in the humanities longer than thesis work in the physical sciences.

For one thing, in the sciences one’s graduate advisor usually takes a more active role in proposing and refining the research topic. Sometimes, in fact, the advisor’s own research mostly consists of designing and supervising projects for student researchers to carry out; the physicist Richard Feynman once defined dissertation research as “research done by an advisor under unusually trying circumstances”, or words to that effect.

The humanities student is more likely to have an independently chosen topic that’s less closely related to the advisor’s own research specialty, and thus takes more labor on the student’s part to construct.

Moreover, the sheer size of the output is a factor too. The average PhD dissertation in math or the sciences is comparatively short—usually under 200 pages in double-spaced dissertation format. The average humanities dissertation is supposed to be more like the rough draft of a book—generally over 300 pages, and often over 500.

Fieldwork and its demands also drag out the process. Generally, graduate students in the physical sciences do their thesis work on-site, working in their advisor’s lab on the campus where they’re enrolled. This is usually impossible for students in fields like anthropology, who have to travel to remote areas to conduct their fieldwork. Similarly, students in history or art or what have you often need to work with sources (archives, museums, etc.) that are located far from their own institutions.

(By the way, have you considered actually, you know, talking to humanities/arts/social sciences students at your institution to find out what their thesis work is like? Surely they don’t just keep you engineering students locked in the basement the whole time? ;))

12 
 For my undergrad work, I wrote a dissertation (I was in an advanced program) that was about 300 pages long, although for presentation I cut it down to 100 pages (which was *excruciating* since all of the 300+ pages was relevant, and most of it fairly vital.  Believe me, you can enter uncharted territory in the liberal arts (mine dealt with a specific author's impact and representation of American white male masculinity in contrast with non-whites, non-Europeans, and everything in between; I think I ended up with about 16 racial/gender classes).  
 In many ways, because the non-"scientific" disciplines are open for a degree of interpretation, they become more complex.  And, of course, any well-researched liberal/social arts thesis incorporates many areas of the more "hard" sciences - mine included demography, psychiatry/psychology, sexual physiology, statistics, economics, several others that I haven't got the energy to contemplate at the moment.
 I've always thought of science as being an art because of the degree of interpretation required to fully grasp broad "scientific" principles (which are often, I think poetic in a way); similarly, when I've taught literature and poetry, I've always warned students that just because something is "creative" doesn't make it art (or even worth reading/looking at/listening to/thinking about).
13

Well, we all know the board needs more personal anecdotes…

I did survey research for my dissertation (social science field)–which involved a godawful amount of time just developing the instrument. That was a pain–not so much because I had to test its psychometric properties (it wasn’t really that kind of survey) but I needed to check its validity and reliability. After that process (focus groups, etc), I had to pilot test it on one campus and do data analysis on the results to show the thing was viable. Then I had to do it all over again, but this time on three different campuses to collect the data I’d actually write my dissertation about. Then there was the analysis of the data–not to mention actually writing the damn thing. And of course before I even developed the instrument I had to do the big lit review that showed I had absorbed what everyone else had done in this area, and identified something we didn’t know (which my research could fill).

I can’t claim any of this was interesting or important, but it certainly was time-consuming.

People who do secondary data analysis may save some time, but the numerous requirements for doing a good, thorough, well-written, committee-pleasing piece of research remains a lengthy process.

I can’t speak to the humanities.

14

Humanities-- first you have to learn to at least fluidly read the three most relevant languages. Than you come up with a topic that is novel enough and sophisticated enough that 3 good people in the field will ok it. Do a whole pile of research finding everything you can read with no real secure sense of when ‘enough’ is. When you get that sense, you’re wrong; start over. Then you desperately scrounge for enough cash to go do research on incredibly obscure things in foreign libraries (“ok. . it looks like, in the world. . . the British library has one copy, and some guy in Krakow has the other copy”) and finding unpublished materials in sketchy 15th-century handwriting in allergen-laden archival dungeons for a year or two. As you write your findings up into your 350 page monster and try to pass it by important people in the field with all their methodological bickering among one another and insane stylistic quibbles (Oops! Scooped! Go back three spaces! Someone else got their dissertation done and its title is too close to your topic! Barf for half a day from anxiety, and come up with some byzantine methodological framework to spin yours within so that it sounds like a new contribution again) you wonder why you didn’t choose a field where you can just sit around on the nice side of campus in Santa Barbara or San Diego fully funded while your thesis advisor writes a topic and you press a button on a machine (it’s big and red and says “RUN”) then plug those numbers into a spreadsheet and then talk about how pathetic humanities students are with a group of other 25 year old men who only pretend to know how to use sliderules, and then all 6 of you can put your name on the same journal article (thought I’d share prejudices from the humanities side of things, for your enjoyment).

15

I wrote a qualitative dissertation in psychology, and I’d say that my classmates writing quantitative dissertations spent as much time setting up their methods and collecting data as I did interviewing my participants. However, when we got to “Results,” they hit “enter” and discovered whether their results were significant, and (if so) wrote a brief chapter saying so, or (if not) ran a different analysis. I, however, spent months coding my data, organizing it (think: giant room, walls and floor completely covered in bits of color-coded paper and post-its), sending it back to my participants to hear their responses, and rewriting the chapter that was a huge chunk of the dissertation (270 pages all together).

16

But I do know how to use a sliderule, cause I disn’t read all that Heinlein as a girl for nuthin.

17

My father has a PhD in English. If I understand correctly what his dissertation was about, it was an early analysis of Troilus and Criseyde using a computer. (I believe it was programmed in punch cards, which has been a source of amusement for his children over the years.) I have no idea how novel the method of the analysis was nor how novel the analysis was itself and I have not been able to come up with anything that mentions that work, though I’m not really sure how to do the search terms anyway and it’s not like I have an English version of SciFinder. Heck, I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen a copy of his dissertation, though I’m sure it’s somewhere in my parents’ house.

Isn’t it amazing how little kids know about their parents?

18

Make his day–ask to read his dissertation!

19

I just read a student’s attempt at a thesis, wherein he basically gave a play-by-play of the narrative of a James Joyce short story. I told him he has to take an arguable position about the story, based on his interpretation of it, or he has no thesis.

Commonly, a student will give a story a Marxist or Freudian interpretation and try to get a thesis out of that.

20

Something like* Covert Exchange and Commerce in the Misses Morkan’s Annual Dance: Class and Classism in Joyce’s The Dead*?