Any doctoral research project that involves human subjects requires Institutional Review Board approval. Every university has an IRB, which grants permission to doctoral students to conduct research. The IRB reviews the student's research plans to ensure the protection of human subjects. In most cases, doctoral students complete an IRB form that outlines their planned research. Students have to secure IRB approval before they can move forward with their research, and they must include the letter of approval as an appendix in their dissertation.
Many doctoral research projects also require permission outside of the Institutional Review Board. For example, if doctoral students plan to work with another institution, such as a school or hospital, to conduct research, they need to receive permission from the institution to work with students or patients. Likewise, human subjects who participate in doctoral research need to give the student permission to use their name, or a pseudonym, and responses in their dissertation. Doctoral students need to collect these permissions before initiating their research.
After doctoral students conduct their research, they have to interpret the data to make it relevant to their dissertation. This, often, is the most time-consuming part of the research process. It is at this point that doctoral students search for overarching themes in their findings, preferably themes that offer new insight in their field of study. During this analysis phase, doctoral students consider biases, limitations of the study, and the research instrumentation used.
The doctoral research process ends with the dissertation. Here, students take their research findings and collate them into coherent, relevant findings. Writing the dissertation is an ongoing process that begins early in the student's doctoral career. She might write her literature review, normally the second chapter of the dissertation, during her coursework so that she can broaden her knowledge in the field. However, the core chapters, normally the fourth and fifth chapters, explain the researcher's findings and discuss the results of those findings. Doctoral students should expect to draft several revisions of these chapters with input from their dissertation committee.