Thoughts on one year doctorates?

To clarify, in my PhD, my concentration was in higher education, while my specialization was in nontraditional higher education.

In my DSoSci, you didn't have a "major" per se. The program was focused on human resource development, with some students taking a macro (national or international) perspective while others focused on micro-matters. I did that. But it was human resource development, not human resources. In laymen's terms, training and not HR. (But it's more complicated than that.)

To your question, I didn't save any time. I got through it with fewer bumps, but it took much longer. I did my first dissertation in about a year, while my Leicester thesis took more than two.

Why? Well, because I knew a lot more about what I was doing, for one thing. I look back at my Union dissertation and grimace. Sure, it was good enough, but I missed SOOOOOOO many opportunities to make it better and to situate it better into scholarly theory. I knew that the second time around, so I wrote a much better product.

Also, the methodologies I employed were different. At Union, I employed qualitative analysis on a deductive project. Data-gathering took weeks and analysis only weeks more. Write the hypotheses, design the study, collect the data, analyze the data, report the data, and answer the hypotheses. But at Leicester I took an inductive, qualitative approach. That meant months of interviews, months more to analyze them, then induce (create) a grounded theory from it all. Testing theory (deductive) is a lot more straight-forward than is inductive. In fact, the university didn't want me to do an inductive study at all because of its open-ended structure. That was a huge disagreement that took me most of a year to resolve.

Finally, I took more time because I could. There was absolutely nothing to be gained from graduating and earning the DSoSci. The experience was everything and the degree meant nothing. That has held true almost a decade later. My research at Leicester is central to my current practice, while the degree has not been a factor anywhere.

In short, I took more time the second time around because I conducted a more challenging research project using an extremely difficult methodology (grounded theory), but I made a much stronger contribution to HRD scholarship and practice.

 

Everything. He. Said.