Successfully and Efficiently Developing, Completing, Presenting, And Even Enjoying a Doctoral Dissertation in Psychology

This ebook presents guidelines for originating, developing, designing, writing, refining, conducting, progressing with, presenting, surviving, modifying, completing, and even enjoying a doctoral dissertation and master’s thesis in psychology.  


These guidelines are based on my experiences serving as major advisor on 70+ dissertations and theses, serving as a member on more than three times that many dissertation and thesis committees (I was reluctant to count) at four universities, and talking with many other colleagues who have served as dissertation advisors.  In addition, I incorporated suggestions from former advisees who have successfully completed their dissertation and are now active professionals and scholars. While serving as the director of clinical studies (four times in two universities) and a psychology department chair, I have also heard about many positive and negative experiences encountered by students during the dissertation process. In addition, I also completed a dissertation, although I violated many of the guidelines presented below. (There were no helpful guidelines when I did my doctoral dissertation at the University of Colorado in 1971.)

I promote dissertations that are of  "publishable quality," not a dimension that is necessarily important to all advisors or departments, and not a dimension that is easy to assess early in the process.  The guidelines are also influenced by my roles as editor, associate editor, and consulting editor on several psychology journals.  I have reviewed thousands of manuscript submissions, and some aspects of the guidelines are meant to prevent errors that I have observed in these manuscripts, as well as in the dissertations and theses that I have read and mentored.


These guidelines do not cover essential knowledge areas to which most students have already been exposed by the time they reach the dissertation level—they are a distillation of concepts and methods that are important in the dissertation development process.  Trusting your training and expertise, I infrequently discuss research designs, statistics, measurement principles, specific procedures, and research ethics. But if you want additional instructions and examples in these areas, I provide a list of recommended Resources at the end of this guide, and a 2006 book by Cone and Foster (see Resources) is a less distilled overview of the dissertation process.