Dissertation Work

Nothing is quite so fine as to receive validation that you are doing a good job on the dissertation proposal as positive comments from committee members! I've been working on this a long time... wandered down the path of various theoretical perspectives, fell in love with all the different research methods and wanted to try them all! Alas, I have just this one life to live! Then, two years ago I fell in love with factorial surveys, historical-comparative analysis, conversational analysis, and discourse analysis... and wanted to do them all, but I had to be pragmatic, and given the demands of my job and my family, again, I had to make the decision of what worked best with the subject I intended to study. So I fell in love with case study methods... mutliple, comparative, critical, embedded... but there's only so much time and so, much to my chagrin, I am doing a single case study. It's so hard to choose and narrow down because I want to do it all...does it sound weird to say that I love being a graduate student? Even the dissertation process, and all of the life-event interruptions I've experienced, this process has been so rewarding, challenging, and in a way, mind-altering. My world view has changed, and that is the value of education, to change and "grow" the mind. The dissertation process...Human Development at work!