Introduction

In this first video, we’ll talk about a key characteristic of all well-designed research, which is alignment. [does some funny little voice while enunciating the individual syllables of “a-lign-ment” while gesturing in a left-to-right line to set the stage for the visual presentation of alignment that is to come] Whether you are a beginning researcher, conducting your earliest research projects for your master’s or doctoral degrees, or a seasoned researcher conducting studies for publication, achieving alignment in your study is super important. It’s an area that we find our clients need lots of help with when doing their dissertations. So, I’ll be talking with you today about alignment to provide you with a clear and more concrete understanding of what alignment means, as well as with an understanding of how to achieve alignment in your study and why this is so important.

Creating alignment is a key part of developing your topic, and if you’re still looking to more fully develop your own topic, we can provide help with your dissertation focus and other elements for you. Check out our video on topic development for more!

Alignment is an essential characteristic of a well-designed study, and yet it can be quite difficult to achieve for novice researchers. In fact, we often provide dissertation help to clients who are struggling to align their studies. And, we commonly find that alignment issues are truly the root problem that reviewers often mislabel as editing issues at the dissertation prospectus, concept paper, or proposal stage.

So before you focus your efforts on APA editing needlessly, let’s talk first about how to achieve alignment in your study, starting with what alignment means. When your study is appropriately aligned, this means that all of the core pieces of your research plan follow logically from the problem that you have constructed from your review of the research literature. Following your problem statement, you must craft the subsequent pieces of your research plan so that they all match one another in terms of the language that you use to discuss variables or phenomena of interest, and the plans you construct for collecting and analyzing your data. As I mentioned previously, we often find that master’s and doctoral candidates, as novice researchers, need some dissertation help when different pieces of their studies don’t quite fit together as well as they should. When we provide this form of dissertation consulting, here are the areas that we ensure are aligned:

The key features of the study that must be aligned are the problem statement, the purpose statement, the research questions, the theoretical framework, the method and design, the data collection and analysis procedures, and the significance of the study.

You might visualize these different key pieces of your study as boxcars on a train that must all be linked together for your study to function successfully as a process for gaining new insights or understanding of your topic.

If any of these cars are not linked to the car preceding it, then clearly your study will be a nonfunctional collection of segments that don’t work well with one another. In other words, the train falls apart and never gets to its destination! We don’t want that, do we? To clarify how these different segments of your study fit together, let’s move on to discuss each of these in more detail.

The problem statement is essentially the centerpiece of your study, or the engine that drives the train forward. Although this statement is usually fairly brief, at about 350 words or so, the information contained within the statement defines the direction the entire study will follow.

Your problem statement must define the exact nature of the problem as derived through a thorough review of all current research in the peer-reviewed literature related to your topic. The problem statement must also describe the research gap, which refers to a specific topic that has not been studied sufficiently and requires further examination through research.

As an example, your problem statement might revolve around high school students who engage in aggressive behaviors at school in spite of the presence of a schoolwide positive behavior support program. Maybe there have been several quantitative studies that document the overall positive effects of this type of schoolwide program on student challenging behavior, but the researchers who conducted these studies found that in spite of widespread improvements in behavior in response to such programs, many students continue to exhibit aggressive behavior, leaving us to ask: Why is this? Why is it that certain kids keep fighting and yelling at school, even under a behavior support program that has been so helpful to so many other students?

The lack of understanding of continued aggressive behavior by some students within schools that use schoolwide positive behavior supports would be the gap that these researchers argue must be better understood if we are to effectively address aggressive behavior across all students.

Now, following from this problem and research gap is the purpose of the study, or the purpose statement. The purpose is a very concise statement that basically says, “This is what I’m trying to do here in this study, and here’s how I’m going to do it.” In order to achieve alignment, the purpose must match what has been stated in the problem statement, which is accomplished through use of the same language to describe your variables or phenomena of interest. The purpose statement must also specify the method and design and must use language that “fits” this approach.

Using the example of the problem and research gap from above, an appropriate purpose statement might be: “The purpose of this qualitative case study is to explore middle school teachers’ perspectives on underlying causes of continued aggressive behavior in students within schools that use schoolwide positive behavior supports.”

Let’s have a look at the key pieces of this purpose statement.

So, we have a qualitative case study, the word “explore,” middle school teachers’ perspectives, continued aggressive behavior in students, and schools that use schoolwide positive behavior supports. So, those are all the key pieces of the purpose statement.

What you’ll notice here is that this purpose statement specifies an intent to examine the very same problem that is described in the problem statement. This is essential for achieving alignment.

Also, the qualitative method is aligned with the problem because we are seeking to understand a phenomenon that is somewhat rare, and that might require perspectives of those who have witnessed this problem first-hand to understand fully. Note also the use of the word “explore” in the purpose statement. This is a deliberate choice of words as qualitative studies are largely exploratory, and aimed at using such exploration to better understand complex processes.

The link from the problem to the purpose is essential to establishing an aligned study. We often find that doctoral candidates need some assistance with their dissertations here as the phrasing used in the purpose statement must be extremely concise and yet precisely aligned with each key concept, variable, or phenomenon as presented in the problem statement.

This is something that many of our clients struggle with, and if you are also finding yourself struggling to align your problem and purpose, give us a call or send an email to see how we can help you out with this major step in crafting your dissertation. No matter where you attend, we can definitely help you out with alignment.

But, we have particularly extensive experience with all of the major online universities, and are very familiar with their formats, review processes, and the types of alignment problems that often arise for individuals at these universities. And, if we help you with establishing alignment in your dissertation, we’ll provide unlimited revisions to our work with no extra charge as needed to obtain approval of your work.

Next in the alignment chain are the research questions, which must align with your purpose in terms of the variables or phenomena of interest that you plan to study. You must also use phrasing in these questions that is consistent with the method and design for your study. In the working example I have been using, an appropriate research question might be, “How do middle school teachers working in schools that implement schoolwide positive behavior supports perceive the causes for continued aggression in students in their schools?” Note that this question maintains consistent focus on the perceptions of middle school teachers, that the question specifies that schoolwide positive behavior supports are in place, and continues with the focus on causes for continued aggression in some students.

Next is the theoretical framework, which must be appropriate for guiding inquiry and developing research questions that suitably address your problem. It must also fit your study in terms of its applicability for interpreting or explaining the ultimate findings or results of the analysis. In the current example, it would be important to pick a theory that is relevant to student behavior and the causes for different types of behavior. So, picking a theory like Observational Learning Theory or Ecological Systems Theory would work, as these are theories that explain human behavior in terms of different types of social and environmental influences.

Aligning the theoretical framework to the purpose statement and RQs can also be a bit tricky for new researchers. Choosing a useful TF requires seeing how the different variables or phenomena of interest in your study might interact with regard to your specific RQs or outcomes of interest; this can sometimes require piecing together existing knowledge on your topic and making a reasonable guess as to the theory or combination of theories that might ultimately be helpful in explaining your findings. Sometimes this process can be quite confusing, especially when you are examining RQs that are unique or groundbreaking. In this case, you might find that you need help reworking this part of your dissertation to identify the most fitting theory or combination of theories to frame your study and interpret its findings.

Moving forward, the method and design must be appropriate for examining the specific problem articulated, and for generating knowledge that will truly shed light on the problem as described. As I mentioned previously, the qualitative method would be appropriately aligned to this study because of your aim of exploring a poorly understood phenomenon, which is the continued aggression in certain students in spite of schoolwide positive behavior supports.

The case study design is also aligned with this focus, because this design is great for building understanding of complex processes as they naturally occur in specific groups or settings. You can see how exploring teachers’ perceptions of the causes of aggression within certain schools would turn out to be a very complex study, which would be concerned with how the complexities of student behavior unfold on a daily basis within schools that use positive behavior supports. For these reasons, the qualitative case study design is nicely aligned with the overall study.

Also, keep in mind that we are unique among data analytics companies in that we also specialize in qualitative research and analysis, so if you are planning a qualitative study and are having problems with alignment, I am 100% sure that we can help you to resolve these problems.

To maintain alignment, your data collection procedures must be developed to obtain data of a type that is appropriate given the method and design. Similarly, the data analysis plan must be appropriate given the nature of the data, variables, research design.

For a qualitative case study design, you would want to use data collection approaches like interviews, observations, and review of relevant documents. You would want to draw up an analysis plan that identified common themes and facilitated triangulation across your different data sources. If you put together a data collection plan that used quantitative measures, this would result in misalignment, as the data you collected would be numerical rather than text-based.

Aligning your methods to your problem, purpose, and research questions is essential for ensuring that the results or findings you ultimately obtain truly address the problem that you have identified. Creating an aligned method requires not just attention to consistent phrasing related to your variables or phenomena of interest, but also a thorough understanding of statistical analysis or qualitative analysis. We often provide dissertation help to clients to develop thorough methods sections that are perfectly aligned with the overall aims of their studies.

We have extensive experience with all of the major online universities, and are very familiar with their formats, review processes, and the types of alignment problems that often arise for individuals at these universities. Also, we are the only academic consulting firm that specializes in qualitative research. If you are planning a qualitative study and are having problems with aligning the various components of your qualitative methodology, we can definitely help you out. Also, we provide unlimited revisions to our work with no extra charge as needed to obtain approval of your work.

Finally, the significance refers to the potentially positive outcomes of your study, if all goes well. To maintain alignment, your significance of the study section must logically flow from the problem, and cannot overreach the bounds of what is possible to accomplish given the potential findings of the study.

Given our running example, an aligned significance section would point out that gaining understanding of teachers’ perceptions of the causes for continued aggression in students within a schoolwide positive behavior support program might be helpful in effectively addressing challenging behavior in students whose behavior is resistant to change.

Ensuring that your proposed study is perfectly aligned is important for obtaining approval of your study. But, the reasons for seeking out dissertation help around alignment issues in your proposed study are really much more important than this. If you move forward with collecting your data in a proposed study that is not well aligned, you can run into some serious problems down the road.

To help explain the vital importance of alignment in your study, it will be helpful to ask: Why is it a problem if elements of my study are not aligned?

If your study is out of alignment, this means that one or more of these key pieces aren’t linked with the pieces around them.

There are some pretty serious consequences of moving forward with an improperly aligned study. For one, it could result in collecting data that do not address your problem, or that cannot actually answer your research questions. Also, this could result in conducting data analysis that results in unreliable, invalid, or untrustworthy findings. Lastly, a misaligned study could result in findings that cannot be soundly interpreted within the explanatory theoretical framework for the study.

These are clearly problems that no researcher wants to deal with, especially when you are just getting started. This is definitely where a dissertation consultant can come in handy, and if you would like some help with your dissertation proposal or prospectus to resolve alignment problems, give us a call or send an email — we’d love to help you out!