Kisses and Dissertations
July 6th is World Kiss Day. Hopefully, when you woke this morning, you gave your partner a kiss. Maybe you have young children who still live at home, and you were able to give them a kiss before you rushed off to work today.
A kiss from a mother can soothe a scrapped knee. A kiss from a friend can warm a greeting. A kiss from a crush can make the heart race. Micheal Corleone sealed his brother Fredo’s fate with a kiss. And, Judas Iscariot used a kiss to betray Jesus Christ. A kiss can change a frog into a prince, wake Sleeping Beauty, and help you finish your dissertation. Huh- wait. What’s that last part?
Of course, I’m not talking about just any kiss. The kiss I’m talking about is special. K.I.S.S. is an engineering design principle that originated from the Lockheed Skunk Works. The acronym stands for Keep It Simple Stupid, and it was the guiding principle for the design of multiple military warplanes and spy planes.
At Lockheed, K.I.S.S. dictated that planes be designed in such a way as to repaired in combat conditions with a minimal array of readily available tools. For your dissertation K.I.S.S. ensures that your research design be quick, feasible, and devoid of unnecessary complication.
Your research should utilize either a quantitative methodology or a qualitative methodology, never a mixed methodology. Mixed methodologies require multiple modes of data collection and analysis. You have to write two Chapter 3s, two Chapter 4s, and include extra details in Chapters 1, 2, & 5. Not the quickest approach, right?
Your research design should specify where you will collect your data and how. It is important that you are 100% confident that you will be able to interview, survey, or otherwise engage the people who will help you develop your data. If you are not 100% confident in this regard, then you cannot be sure that your project is feasible. Right?
Your data collection should interview as few people as necessary. Interviews require significant time on the part of both the researcher and the interviewees. It is important not to complicate the data-collection process by involving more participants than necessary. And, who wants to sign on for more work, anyway?
K.I.S.S. prefers surveys to interviews – quicker data collection, less time involved on the part of the researcher, and less reliance on specific participants.
K.I.S.S. rules out pre-test/post-test and other intervention-based designs. They require too much time and suffer from too many possible points of failure.
K.I.S.S. will help you develop a dissertation project with a simple beginning, middle, and end, which will enable you to get in, get out, and graduate.
