Before you begin writing a dissertation outline, it may be best to consult a dissertation manual from your school. Some schools are very particular about the order of sections for dissertation outlines and will require that you follow a preset outline. Regardless of the school or subject, most dissertations will follow a basic format: abstract, introduction, literature review, research methodology, results, conclusions and future work.
The abstract of a dissertation outline is like a summary. It lays out the rest of the document, giving readers a map to topic discussed in your dissertation. The purpose of the abstract typically is to give a quick overview of the outline sections that will follow.
The next section to include in your dissertation outline is the introduction. In this section, you provide a background summary of the topic area you are researching. This section commonly includes some historical references as well, so the reader can understand the context of your research.
The literature review is also important, as it gives a comprehensive look at all of the research related to your topic. This section normally includes secondary sources of information such as books and articles, as well as primary sources, such as interviews and media transcripts. The purpose of the literature review is to show the reader what has already been done in the field of study. More importantly, in this section you show the reader what areas lack research and thus need to be investigated.
The research methodology section typically states what your research questions are and describes how you intend to answer them, hence research methodology. The purpose of this section is to map out the overall plan of your research study for the reader. Your research questions will be used to guide your overall research, so they should be focused and very specific. The questions should be clear and not too broad. Research questions should also hint at the type of information needed for the study such as raw data versus anecdotal.
Now that you have your research questions, you have to devise an appropriate research methodology. The purpose of the research methodology is to give the overall plan for your research study. Research methodologies can be qualitative or quantitative, or both. A qualitative methodology commonly involves using surveys and interviews to study people — their attitudes, behaviors and experiences. On the other hand, a quantitative methodology typically involves the use of statistical techniques to analyze data that is collected from surveys or from sets of already gathered information. You may also use this section to state your rationale for choosing a purely qualitative, purely quantitative or mixed methodology. Your choice of methodology could be based on a similar methodology used in previous research within the field of study or the methodology could be suitable for the type of data that you need to collect. Both are valid reasons for choosing a certain type of methodology.
The next section that follows normally is the results section. The purpose of the results section is to summarize of the key findings of your study. Here you can talk about results that were expected and others that were surprises. In this section, you can also give your opinion on why the results occurred.
Usually, the next section is for implications or conclusions. The purpose of this section is to give your conclusions about the topic — what you can say with certainty about your topic after the research. In this section you may also discuss the implications of your research on the field of study and why you feel they are important. You can demonstrate how your research contributes to the field, how it could expand upon current research threads and how it explores a new related thread or introduces new directions in the field of study.
The last section of a dissertation outline is for future work. In this section, you normally discuss the limitations of your own research study and what questions came up during your research that weren't addressed in your dissertation. You might also point to new areas of interest that arose in the process of completing your study.
