Page Length and Methodological Characteristics of Recently Published Doctoral Dissertations in Education

Abstract

In this methodological review, we conducted a quantitative content analysis of a random sample of 107 education-related doctoral dissertations published in Proquest Dissertations and Theses database in 2011. Seven raters coded each article in terms of page lengths (overall and within each chapter), research method (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods), author gender, and university characteristics (online or traditional). We found that the median education dissertation length was 161 pages long, but those page lengths differed between research methods. The median page lengths of qualitative, mixed method, and quantitative dissertations were 210, 187, and 147 respectively. The median page length of education dissertations from online universities was 44 pages shorter than education dissertations from their traditional counterparts. Contrary to previous research, we found no statistically significant relationship between gender and methods choice.

Keywords

• Dissertations
• page length