Any PhD has in it three trinities. The first trinity talks about the famous three “ologies”. The second trinity, which I will be talking about in today’s post is the relationship between:
Literature Review
Method
Empirical work
These three tasks, if I may say, may appear to be very distinct to you and you may wonder, what binds them together so strongly? Well, if you look at it from my vision, all the chapters in a PhD thesis revolve around these themes only. They are independent themes in themselves and at the same time have a very smooth link to one another. When I say that, I mean, one leads to the other.
The first theme or the content of the trinity, as I said in the beginning of the blog, is a very broad document, in terms of it coverage. You need to work around compressing different school of thoughts into one area and then from its review and genesis, you need to cull out the research questions that have gone unanswered in the existing research.
The second theme which is the method transits forwards to a more specific purpose than generic. Here you need to move to the specific of the design. The task here is to set out the mechanics of how the research will be executed. Document A should transient into Document B seamlessly by articulating the method that needs to be adopted to answer the question stated in Document A
A lot of researchers say, rather insist at this point that if A and B are done carefully then graduating to Document C is simple easy and in fact a very linear progression. Research of course is not as simple as it sounds. At this stage, there have been research scholars who have found reverse engineering links between the three documents. The outcome at level C and help to make relevant and logical modifications at the preliminary levels.
All to remember is that the key thing that examiners look for some coherence between the Literature Review, Method and the Empirical work. This kind of connection and linkage brings in structural integrity which is the essence of any good document.