There are many forms of arguments available to organize the chapters and the whole of your dissertation. You may use different forms in each chap-ter without any ill effects. In this section we discuss six kinds of effective arguments that you can use to structure your chapters.
Arguments That Lay Out Categories
In this form of argument, the whole piece you want to discuss is divided into parts, which are then described and analyzed. Readers must under-stand each of the parts if they are to underunder-stand the whole. In a chapter on how women teachers handle conflicts in their work, we were inter-ested in how ways of resolving conflicts related to self-regulation (Biklen, 1995). We developed categories to describe the different ways the teach-ers handled conflicts they faced. These included: “unhappy compliance,”
where teachers went along with the demands of administrators or the school district because they were afraid of losing their jobs or making the administration unhappy if they stated their desires more openly; “the standoff,” where the teachers used the strategy of ignoring what they did not like and were unable to resolve conflicts; “covert resistance,” where teachers refused to go along with district policies or practices but did not want to openly state their resistance; and “open resistance,” where large groups of teachers refused to cooperate with policies they could not tolerate.
This example of different forms of teacher resistance is just one sort of argument you can construct using categories. There are numerous possi-bilities: categories of education travel, forms of talk about race, strategies of teaching reading to struggling high school students, forms of racism that college students recognize, ways doctors categorize parents of premature babies (Bogdan, Brown, & Foster, 1982). When knowing different types will help the reader understand your point, this is an effective form of argu-ment to use.
Arguments That Provide Answers to Questions (That You Ask)
You use this argumentative strategy when you want to organize a chapter around a single point. There may be many smaller points that you will have to subsume under this larger question, but the single question focuses the reader’s energy and attention around the main point. Why do college women find it difficult to answer direct questions put to them about gen-der? This is a question that could organize a chapter. Your presentation of data would lead you to answer this question. At the end of the chapter, the reader should be able to understand the four or five reasons that the women struggled with the question. Another question that might organize a chapter or a dissertation would be: Why do teachers with good inten-tions to empower girls about their bodies in sex education classes continu-ally fail to do so? This approach requires strong evidence and a good question. It can have a powerful impact.
Arguments That Argue for the Worth of a Topic
This approach is particularly effective when the topic has not heretofore been considered worthy of serious study. The dissertation introduction tries to persuade the reader that a topic previously considered too small, insig-nificant, or even overstudied deserves attention because of its significance.
Then the three data chapters make different points about this. Two dis-sertations that took this approach investigated understudied topics: cheer-leaders and the prom. Both saw them as sites for discussing gender, race, and class. One dissertation (Swaminathan, 1997) showed how cheerleading was a different practice depending on the school where students practiced it. At the city school, for example, being a cheerleader meant that students could “be somebody,” while at the wealthy suburban school it meant that you were a failed athlete. Schooling and the Production of Popular Culture:
Negotiating Subjectivities at the High School Prom (Best, 1998) was the first scholarly writing of any kind on the topic of the prom and culture. It be-came a much more popular topic a few years later when events at proms made headlines (see Best, 2000).
Arguments That Conceptualize a Topic in a Particular Way Another form of argument insists on a specific approach to a topic. A num-ber of current scholars, for example, emphasize the significance of the dis-ability rights perspective for the study of people with disabilities (e.g.,
Schwartz, 2006). This is a particularly important form of argument when the approach has not been used in your field. If most researchers studying persons with intellectual disabilities, for example, use a developmental or clinical approach, then using a disability rights perspective can offer a contrasting way of understanding issues that may challenge what others take for granted. Nancy Lesko’s (2001) work on adolescents was concep-tualized in this form, and argued that taking a developmental approach to adolescents was dangerous because it wrote them off as underdeveloped adults. She argued for a social constructionist approach, instead.
Arguments That Foreground a Specific Theoretical Frame
These arguments describe different theoretical positions and suggest that a particular theoretical approach offers insight not otherwise available. You would use this form of argument if your interest lies in how your data advance theory, rather than in how different theories illuminate data. The text has to describe multiple approaches and then settle on one, explain-ing its significance for the topic. In “K Is Mentally Ill,” for example, Dor-othy Smith (1990) shows how an analysis of an account of a person’s becoming mentally ill diverges radically from other accounts if theorized through institutional ethnography. If you are concerned with advancing critical race theory or intersectionality, your dissertation can employ data to do just that. Banks (2006) used this form to argue that studying the ex-periences of Black women at American universities expanded and revised Bourdieu’s theories about cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984, 1997). While Bourdieu’s framing of cultural capital contributes to explanations of so-cial reproduction, Banks showed how alternative forms of cultural capital contributed to the students’ agency as students and helped them overcome their unfamiliarity with university expectations. In this approach, it is important to make sure that the theories fit the data.
Arguments That Construct Multiple Perspectives on a Topic This form of argument demonstrates oppositional or contrasting ways of considering a topic. In a case study using symbolic interaction, for example, you might argue for the investments that different participants in a single setting have for their claims (e.g., Luschen, 2005). Or using multisite eth-nography (Marcus, 1998), you might—as anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (2005) did in her study of television in Egypt—make a specific argument about how particular ideas circulate in or between cultures and are inter-preted differently in various communities. Or you might explore how
prac-tices such as emotional labor, for example, are enacted and evaluated in different settings (Hochschild, 1983). Here the theories of symbolic inter-actionism or multisite ethnography, unlike in the previous type of argu-ment discussed, animate the arguargu-ment, but the arguargu-ment centers on the data rather than the theory.
In short, there are many elements to the good dissertation. In this chapter we have described a few of the “ingredients” to consider when you shape yours. Your goal is to produce a document that teaches readers a different way of considering an area that they may or may not understand well. You want all the work that you do to produce a strong dissertation—the reading, the planning, the data gathering and analysis, the writing and rewriting—
to be visible to the reader without telling the reader to notice them.