Dissertation 'I'

I am writing a dissertation for my taught MA course this summer and I would like to have a few opinions on writing it in the first person.

I'm sure a few people are thinking 'how dare he!' but hear me out. I was in the army and would like to base my dissertation on what I did in Afghanistan (a training/mentoring mission). Is this acceptable? Of course I'll speak to the university staff too but I am interested in what others think.

I really would like to include my own experiences as I think they are very relevant and valuable but can't see how to include them in anything other than the first person.

Reply 1

John Stuart Mill

Using an anecdote to support your argument isn't really accepted in academic writing; you might get away with briefly including it to demonstrate a point if you don't base it solely on the anecdote however.

Reply 2

razzamataz

What I am proposing is more than an anecdote. Imagine it more as 7 months of on the job research. It will mainly be focused on the issues surrounding training Afghan nationals.

Reply 3

ChemistBoy

I would still write in the third person. Even though you participated in the training/mentoring programs yourself you should still write about them in as an objective and critical way as possible. Third person allows you to create that objective distance between you and the subject and gives the reader more confidence in your arguments.

Reply 4

razzamataz

Any suggestions on how to do this? I will give you an example (this happened quite often).

I was teaching some Afghans on how to clear someone's airway when they were struggling to breathe. At the end I asked one of them to demonstrate what I had taught them and he said it wasn't up to him to meddle in God's will. He would either live or die.

That is an anecdote but it would be a useful in relation to a discussion about religious illiteracy and beliefs in the overall discussion of developing a police force.

Reply 5

Antifazian

Depends on your subject, as someone hinted above, if you study Anthropology then you could do something like this (although ideally you would have taken field notes, recordings etc in the field at the time to form your research material rather than relying on memory)

The posters above talking about objectivity don't seem to realise that this is only one school of thought, and actually many forms of research have moved towards acknowledging researcher subjectivity and reflexivity as part of the research itself, particularly in social research.

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Reply 6

Joinedup

1. Have a chat with your supervisor, they're there to provide you with guidance.
1a. You might be heading for trouble including your prior research if the regulations for dissertations say you need to get ethics clearance before collecting data you want to use in your diss. Individual supervisors can be more or less sticklers for this sort of thing.
2. You should have a good idea about how to execute academic writing from your undergrad.
3. Read some ethnographic research to see how researchers can write up observations from a situation they were embedded in.

Reply 7

ChemistBoy

Original post by Antifazian

The posters above talking about objectivity don't seem to realise that this is only one school of thought, and actually many forms of research have moved towards acknowledging researcher subjectivity and reflexivity as part of the research itself, particularly in social research.

So Social 'Science' is ceasing its pretention to be a 'science' - fair enough.

Reply 8

Antifazian

Original post by ChemistBoy

So Social 'Science' is ceasing its pretention to be a 'science' - fair enough.

The book i'm reading at the moment actually talks about reflexivity in Biology, Chemistry and Physics too, so unless you're going to suggest that they are also less scientific as a result, then that's a no...

Researchers effect the outcomes of research, that's inescapable. There is no true objectivity in my opinion, and if there were then science certainly wouldn't be where i'd expect to find it, seeing as it is ultimately about a human desire to learn about the world.

You seem to have an unfortunately narrow view of what science is.

Reply 9

ChemistBoy

Original post by Antifazian

Well that's a book about the subjects, not academic papers concerning the reporting of front-line research. In science, it is quite acceptable (and even to be encouraged) to know and understand your own biases and inherent subjectivity when doing research, but this is so that you can be clear to take this into account (and hopefully quantify it where possible) when ensuring maximum objectivity.

It is pretty clear to me, as someone who has published over 20 papers in academic chemistry, written a PhD thesis and countless industrial scientific reports, that the use of the first person is definitely NOT acceptable in any reporting of research in my area for the reasons I have outlined in my first post on this thread. I'm a practicing scientist therefore I don't see the reason to defer to any opinion on how to write up research, and certainly not one that suggests I refere to social theory to do so.

Researchers effect the outcomes of research, that's inescapable.

True, but it is the scientific researcher's job to try to minimise their effect on the outcomes and be clear about the limits to objectivity their research methodology has (i.e. what assumptions they have used).

There is no true objectivity in my opinion, and if there were then science certainly wouldn't be where i'd expect to find it, seeing as it is ultimately about a human desire to learn about the world.

You're flying the face of most philosophers of science there in terms of where you are most likely to find objectivity. It is widely agreed (with the exception of anarchic philosophers such as Feyerabend) that natural science is one of the most objective endeavours of academic scholarship. I believe that is due to the relative objectivity of experiment, for example, it doesn't matter what your concepts are regarding an electron or a magnetic field and under what paradigm you observe them, the electron will bend in a magentic field and the amount it bends will relate to the speed of the electron and the strength of the field (because that is the fundamental nature of electrons). Of course there are assumptions that remain about this observation (concerning the basics of human perception), but relatively it is far more objective than many other areas of research.

You seem to have an unfortunately narrow view of what science is.

There is nothing unfortunate about it. I make a clear demand that science must be able to be falsified based upon experimental observation. This ensures that objectivity is maximised in scientific research and ensures that we can move forward in our improved understanding of the natural world.

I have no problem with other subject areas using the scientific method (i.e. the epistemology of science) to improve the objectivity of their research areas, but I do take objection to other subjects trying to redefine what science is in a looser context in order to shoehorn in unscientific work.