Sociologist 0cb4. Mine was just the length of an abstract. I was then offered a handful of jobs at the most prestigious of universities where high pedigree is a defining characteristic of our department. Sociologist 2e Sociologist 2ef5. Serious answer here: a friend of mine had pages double-spaced, everything included and passed, but he had problems during the defence.
A prof particularly said that this length is suitable for a MA thesis. I wouldn't aim for less than Sociologist 1f1d. Sociologist The length is going to depend heavily on both the methods and emphasis of the dissertation - whether it's quantitative or qualitative, how much and what kind of data is being analyzed, if the dissertation is more empirical rather than theoretical, etc. All in all, I would worry less about the length and more about the content, i.
Economics, mathematics, and biostatistics had the lowest median page lengths, whereas anthropology, history, and political science had the highest median page lengths. This distinction makes sense given the nature of the disciplines. The data graphed are obviously limited to one university in a given period of time, but the results are still interesting to consider.
In particular, we have a comparison point for theses length amongst various disciplines. Is page length an arbitrary measure? My post springboards from this diagram to address a serious issue, which is about how the academic system prepares students for applied research.
In part, we might say that it makes sense for sociology theses to be longer than most other disciplines, since much of our work is based on literature reviews, qualitative data analysis or interpretation of quantitative data using theory. The thing is, producing a long thesis will not necessarily help prepare you for a career as an applied sociologist.
I show that in many cases, applied sociology research will involve the critical analysis of hundreds of sources and datasets which are usually presented in a short summary of only one or two pages.
The best description of a PhD that relates to applied sociology was given to me by my supervisor, a very senior academic who often spoke about the importance of lean writing.
They said that undertaking a dissertation is like doing an apprenticeship. Yes, most universities stipulate the word range for theses — in my university an Honours thesis should be between 10, to 15, words but many sociology students myself included! A PhD by dissertation is between 70, and , words. In sociology we seem to take this as a challenge to write to the limit, rather than aiming to reach the lower range. This is why I now advocate succinct writing.
My Honours thesis was 25, words long and my PhD thesis was , words long and over pages. Including appendixes. Is this hypocrisy? I never supervised students while I was still teaching. I have only ever supervised students as an applied sociologist. This includes as the primary industry supervisor with a student embedded within my workplace, and as an external supervisor who consults and reads advanced and final drafts.
I let my students know how long my theses were and I explained how, knowing what I do now, I can see what should have been cut in two general ways. The loop stops once all records are imported. The important part is to identify the format of each URL so the code knows where to look and where to re-initiate each search. The permanent URL for each student is then accessed and parsed.
The important piece of information for each student takes the following form:. University of Minnesota Ph. July Major: Business. Advisor: Jane Doe. This chunk of text is then saved to the output object for additional parsing. After the online data were obtained, the following code was used to identify page length, major, month of completion, year of completion, and advisor for each character string for each student.
The section of the code that begins with get data using function takes the online data stored as dat on my machine and applies the function to identify the relevant information. The resulting text is converted to a data frame and some minor reworkings are applied to convert some vectors to numeric or factor values. Now the data are analyzed using the check. The data contained 2, records for students that completed their dissertations since The range was incredibly variable minimum of 21 pages, maximum of , but most dissertations were around to pages.
Interestingly, a lot of students graduated in August just prior to the fall semester. As expected, spikes in defense dates were also observed in December and May at the ends of the fall and spring semesters. The top four majors with the most dissertations on record were in descending order educational policy and administration, electrical engineering, educational psychology, and psychology.
Not many differences are observed among the majors, although some exceptions are apparent. Economics, mathematics, and biostatistics had the lowest median page lengths, whereas anthropology, history, and political science had the highest median page lengths.
This distinction makes sense given the nature of the disciplines. The maximum number of students that completed their dissertations for a single advisor since was eight. For those interested, the below code was used to create the plots. How long is the average dissertation? Well damn. I should trim some of that. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.
Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Dissertation How long is a sociology dissertation? Ben Davis April 30, How long is a sociology dissertation? How do you write a dissertation in sociology? How do you write a sociology essay? How do you write an introduction to a sociology essay? What introduction should include? How do you write a long introduction?
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