Think about it. How can you do an introduction to an entire document before you know all the parts? That’s what happens when you force yourself to start your dissertation proposal with chapter one, background and introduction. You don’t have the background yet. How about thinking of a dissertation proposal a little more organically…do a little bit of the lit review, a little of the methodology, some parts of the introduction, add references as you get them.
The outline to most dissertations is pretty much the same. So all you have to do is plug in the sections as you go. The sections for my positivistic case study on why senior women leaders opt out (available at my website at www.thecannonagency.com) is below. So the way I started was that I had read about this phenomenon about women leaders opting out and thought that sounded kind of interesting. I started looking up some articles on the subject and kept separate folders in my laptop for the basic sections.
Time-saving tip: Let’s start with the opt out phenomenon. I found ten articles on the phenomenon and added opt out to the “definition of terms,” added the ten articles to the references using, of course, APA style, and skimmed the articles for related topics which I kept in an outline–I refer to the outline as buckets. I took notes on the sub-topics (reasons for opting out which were a guess at this time) and kept those separated by folders. So I was building my outline one folder at a time. I was guessing that family was a reason to opt out and that career growth was a reason and the glass ceiling was a reason and bosses and organization culture…you get the idea.
The beauty of doing it this way is that some days when you’re dog tired but know you have to do something you can keep plugging away on the grunt work. Then you can save your high energy days for theories or themes or summaries. Another good reason for doing it this way is that it prevents you from investing too much time going in the wrong direction. One of the things I thought would be a big part of my research was the decision making process and decision theory. Turns out to have nothing to do with it so I’m glad I didn’t waste all kinds of time exploring that.
Keep the outline in front of you at all times to keep yourself focused. Add to the outline/TOC as you go along.