In consultation with your Doctoral Supervisory Committee, you will begin to discuss ideas about the focus of your dissertation research. After your ideas develop more fully, you will prepare a written dissertation prospectus. The process of prospectus approval will provide you with important critique and feedback prior to beginning your dissertation research. Once approved, your prospectus will serve as a guide for your dissertation research and the ‘contract’ with your committee regarding the requirements to complete your dissertation. Your committee, in consultation with the PhD Core Faculty if needed, is the final authority on the content, structure, and scope of your dissertation.
Dissertation Prospectus preparation
Timing
- Most students complete their prospectus preparation and approval 1 – 2 quarters after completing the General Examination.
- Your dissertation prospectus must be submitted to and approved by your Doctoral Supervisory Committee within one year of completing your General Examination.
- For consideration of any exceptions to this deadline, you must prepare a written petition and approval must be obtained from both your Doctoral Supervisory Committee and the PhD Core Faculty.
The prospectus as original work
- Your dissertation prospectus, although prepared in consultation with your Doctoral Supervisory Committee, must reflect your own thinking about the clinical and/or scientific importance of the research you propose.
- During the preparation of your prospectus, you are encouraged to consult with committee members or others who can provide you with advice and guidance on designing your project.
- Typically, committee members do not read preliminary or multiple drafts of your entire prospectus, although they can certainly advise on specific sections. Typically, your Committee Chair is the key person who reads and provides guidance on complete drafts of the prospectus document as it emerges and before it goes to your full committee.
- If your proposed dissertation research is related to an ongoing/existing research program of one or more faculty mentors, it is incumbent on you to articulate to the satisfaction of your Doctoral Supervisory Committee that the proposed dissertation work is unique from your mentors’ research and that you have that faculty member’s permission to build off of their work. You need to explicitly specify the ways in which your proposed work differs from and/or extends from the faculty members’ prior, ongoing, or planned work.
- You may choose whether to use a traditional dissertation format or a linked papers format. Discuss this with your Committee Chair (and committee) as to which format best suits your work. The format of the prospectus for a linked papers dissertation might vary depending on the nature of the project.
Prospectus document formatting
With approval of your committee, you may use the formatting style of your choice for the document and references. In absence of any preference by the committee, use of American Psychological Association (APA) style is recommended.
Consult the University of Washington Thesis and Dissertation Handbook for guidance on formatting that will be required in the dissertation.
Dissertation Prospectus Cover Page that includes:
- Title
- Names of committee members
- Projected timeline for completion
- Signature lines for each committee member to sign for their approval of the prospectus (electronic approvals from committee members may be substituted for ink signatures in the case of a remote prospectus meeting). Then, follow the format below which best fits your work for the other elements of the prospectus:
Traditional Dissertation Format
1) A comprehensive review of the literature that thoroughly defines relevant existing research and knowledge on your proposed topic, as well as existing gaps in the literature. This literature review must demonstrate to your committee that you have a comprehensive and deep knowledge of the literature base to inform your own research.
For a traditional dissertation format, a typical literature review is expected to be around 30 pages in length (this is a minimum, not a maximum estimate), and this literature review will be carried forward to be the literature review chapter in your dissertation.
You will be expected to update the literature review for the final dissertation document to capture any new literature published between your prospectus and completion of your dissertation, but the literature review completed for the prospectus must be comprehensive up to that date.
2) A thorough statement of the research problem informed by the gaps in the literature demonstrated in the literature review
3) Your research aims (questions) and hypotheses (as appropriate given your proposed methods)
4) Your research design and detailed methods, including a preliminary data analysis plan. Your prospectus is the agreement between you and your committee regarding the scope, methods, and products that you will produce to complete your dissertation. As such, you and your committee must have a shared understanding of all details of your proposed methods. This methods section must be comprehensive including all details regarding data collection and analysis. This section will form the methods section of your final dissertation document.
If there are methods that you cannot describe in detail in your prospectus because they depend on some future development, describe that clearly in your prospectus and discuss with your committee.
5) A brief description of anticipated findings
6) A discussion of potential limitations and how you plan to address them
Linked Papers Format
1) An introductory chapter that provides an overview of the theme that ties your proposed linked papers together. This chapter can be flexible in length and may need to be only 5 – 6 pages long, but it provides a broad introduction to the research problem / theme and identifies the topic of each of your proposed papers. This chapter gets your reader orientated to the remainder of the prospectus.
Options for organizing a linked papers prospectus after the introductory chapter
There are different options for organizing a linked papers prospectus depending on the nature of the project and the strength of the ties between the papers included. Below are three examples to consider. Regardless of which option you use to organize your prospectus, items 2 – 7 below must be included.
Option 1: The three linked papers are very closely related around one large project.
This applies to instances in which you might be conducting one project (e.g. enrolling one set of participants for data collection) but then separating the data into three separate papers for publication. In this case, you may want to do one comprehensive chapter for the literature review and one comprehensive chapter for the methods as described for the traditional dissertation format above, and then have separate sections or chapters to define the planned analyses and presentation of the data for each of the respective papers.
Option 2: The linked papers represent distinct projects.
This applies to instances in which the linked papers are really separate projects, each with its own data collection and analysis methods. In this case, you may want to organize your prospectus into one chapter per paper with the relevant literature review and methods for each paper in its own chapter.
Other Options:
You may work with your committee chair and committee to identify other ways to organize your prospectus that are more logical for your project. It is particularly helpful to consider efficiency so that your committee does not need to read duplicative material across multiple chapters. However, the level of depth must match that of the traditional dissertation described above.
2) Regardless of the method of organizing a linked papers prospectus, you must provide a comprehensive review of the literature that thoroughly defines relevant existing research and knowledge on your proposed topic as well as existing gaps in the literature. This literature review must demonstrate to your committee that you have a comprehensive and deep knowledge of the literature base to inform your own research.
If you are doing a linked papers format, you may discuss with your committee how they would like the literature review to be organized depending on the relationship among the papers, but commensurate depth to the traditional format (around 30 pages) is needed. You may ultimately truncate this literature review for the final papers to be submitted for publication, but the literature review for the prospectus must be comprehensive for your understanding of the literature, your demonstration of your knowledge to your committee, and for dissertation planning and approval.
Regardless of dissertation format, you will be expected to update the literature review for the final dissertation document to capture any new literature published between your prospectus and completion of your dissertation, but the literature review completed for the prospectus must be comprehensive up to that date.
3) A thorough statement of the research problem informed by the gaps in the literature demonstrated in the literature review
4) Your research aims (questions) and hypotheses (as appropriate given your proposed methods)
5) Your research design and detailed methods, including a preliminary data analysis plan. Your prospectus is the agreement between you and your committee regarding the scope, methods, and products that you will produce to complete your dissertation. As such, you and your committee must have a shared understanding of all details of your proposed methods. This methods section must be comprehensive including all details regarding data collection and analysis. This section will form the methods sections of your final linked papers.
If there are methods that you cannot describe in detail in your prospectus because they depend on some future development, describe that clearly in your prospectus and discuss with your committee.
6) A brief description of anticipated findings
7) A discussion of potential limitations and how you plan to address them
Incorporating a Grant Application into a Prospectus
We strongly encourage you to consider writing a grant to fund your dissertation research. With your committee’s permission, a major grant application (e.g. F31, R36, or equivalent) may fulfill part / much of the writing requirement for a prospectus, with the addition of supplemental information needed to provide comprehensive information about literature review and methods to your committee that might not be included in a grant application due to length constraints.
Students who would like to apply for major grant funding for their dissertation are encouraged to talk with the PhD Program Directors as well as their committee early in the planning process for navigating both the timing and writing requirements to accommodate both the grant and prospectus requirements.
Even if you have completed a major grant application in support of your dissertation, you must still provide documentation to your committee as to what you will complete to fulfill the academic requirements of the dissertation, which may not align completely with what you proposed in a grant. You must also document how you will fulfill the dissertation requirements if you do not get the grant funding.
Small grant applications, such as the Stolov Award application, are not sufficient to use as a prospectus.
Dissertation Prospectus Approval
You are required to meet with your committee to review and obtain approval of your dissertation prospectus as follows:
1) Schedule a 2-hour block of time for the committee meeting. If you need assistance with scheduling a meeting room, work with the Program Coordinator on locating and scheduling a meeting room.
2) Distribute your completed written prospectus to all members of your Doctoral Supervisory Committee at least 2 weeks in advance of your meeting. Consider providing both .pdf and .doc files so that committee members can use the format they prefer to read and provide comments.
3) While this meeting is a critical step in the dissertation process to obtain approval to move forward, the format of the meeting is more of a working meeting than a formal examination. Your committee may ask you to provide a brief presentation at the beginning, including slides, to provide an overview of the project. Any presentation should be very brief (less than 10 minutes) to summarize and remind committee members of the key points of the proposed project, particularly the methods (remember all the committee members have read your prospectus so they do not want or need a lengthy presentation – any presentation simply gets the committee on the same page to start a conversation). The bulk of the meeting should be devoted to responding to questions and obtaining feedback about your prospectus from your committee members. This is the major opportunity for the committee to provide input on the prospectus before it is finalized, so many points, particularly regarding research methods, may need to be discussed.
4) After the discussion period, you will be asked to step outside of the room while the committee decides whether to approve the prospectus as is or to ask you to develop it further prior to prospectus approval. Do not be discouraged if the committee asks for modifications prior to approving your prospectus. New questions or issues can easily emerge during the discussion that committees want to see addressed to ensure that your dissertation is both of the highest possible quality and feasible for a successful completion.
5) Unanimous approval of your prospectus by your committee members is required. Your Doctoral Supervisory Committee members indicate their approval of your prospectus by signing the Dissertation Prospectus Cover Page (or providing electronic signatures or email approval if the meeting is remote). This signifies that the prospectus has been reviewed and approved for scientific merit within the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. After you have obtained approval, submit an electronic copy of the approved prospectus and cover page, signed by each member of your Supervisory Committee (or note approvals sent via email), to the PhD Program Coordinator.
6) Having an approved prospectus does not guarantee that your Doctoral Supervisory Committee will approve your dissertation work at the Final Examination. However, your committee may not later disapprove your dissertation on the basis that the research was poorly conceived. Your approved prospectus becomes the agreement between you and your committee regarding the work you will complete for the Final Examination.
7) Keep in touch with your committee throughout your dissertation research. Committee members appreciate brief progress updates periodically throughout the dissertation – even just an email update.
8) If major modifications to your plan are needed due to unexpected situations that arise in the course of the research, you will need to submit a written document to your committee describing the proposed modifications and justifications, and obtain your committee’s approval. This may or may not require another committee meeting, at the discretion of the committee, depending on the extent of the changes and other circumstances. Discuss this process with your Committee Chair.
(version date 4/3/24)