INQUIRY

The authors of this book workbook précis or primer are senior professors, dissertation advisors, and seasoned administrators for a research university in the Deep South. Our title INQUIRY reflects the books aim to help readers with the principles of research scope concerning investigative (examination); nuances (meaning); questions (evoke); in (throughout); research (scientific) yield (return). The book was generated from many discussions over the years about the quality of dissertations and the organizational challenges experienced by doctoral students before, during and after the dissertation prospectus or proposal stage. The content of this book was driven, motivated, and derived from formative feedback given by some of our doctoral students who completed a series of pre-dissertation proposal workshops.

We have attempted to address all of their typical inquiries, concerns, challenges and issues in the pre and post dissertation proposal process. We have attempted in our short book to capture these challenges and address them in a very succinct précis by identifying ten basic digits for planning the dissertation proposal process and beyond for the lifelong researcher. However we also spend a great of time making suggestions in the preplanning process prior to the ten step process. We recommend that doctoral students seek out separate readings for some of the fundamental components of traditional qualitative research relative to areas such as varying research designs, biography, case study, ethnography, grounded theory, phenomenology, and other elements of conventional quantitative research like instrumentation, sampling, variables, testing, and other statistics.

We call our digits finger tip because the writing and word processing of the dissertation are the manifestation of work from the finger tips of the human hand based on the thinking constructs generated from the mind. Therefore, research derived from the process of dissertation thinking, engaging and writing is the result of cognitive and relational symmetry between the human mind and the human hand. An exercise we have used with our students involves each student putting on latex gloves and writing the chapter initials and numbered digits at the bottom of each finger. This allows the student to look at all finger digits that represent the all sections of the dissertation proposal, while typing about the dissertation on a computer key board.

Given this profound psychological, physiological and metaphorical...