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Consider These Example Defense Questions

What do you see as the main contributions of your research for your discipline, practitioners, and/or policy makers? In what ways, if at all, does your study contribute to the existing literature and/or prior research in the field? In what ways does it extend the literature? Contradict the literature? Fill gaps in the literature? Clarify contradictions in the literature? In planning and conducting this study, which major theorists influenced your thinking? What are the conflicting issues in your field (every field has conflicts—hence, the research problem), and what contributed most to your understanding of these issues? In what ways do you expect that your work will clarify the conflicting issues in your field? What motivated you to conduct this study? In other words, what brought you to explore this particular topic? What new learning about qualitative research have you come away with as a result of conducting this study? What, if any, are the unanticipated outcomes of your study? What surprises have you come away with? What new learning about yourself have you come away with having conducted this study? What additional insights has the dissertation experience afforded you? What were the high and/or low points for you in the dissertation experience? If you were to redo this study, how might you conduct this study differently? How might you change your research methodology? Why? How could you build on or extend this research in the future? What are the major strengths and/or limitations of your research design/methodology? What might further strengthen this study? Why did you analyze the data in the way that you did? How might you have analyzed your data differently? What suggestions might you offer somebody about to conduct a study of this nature? How did you arrive at your conceptual framework? What are the theoretical components of your framework? What informed your conceptual framework? How did you decide upon the components that you include in your conceptual framework? How did the components of your conceptual framework assist you in visualizing and explaining what you intended to investigate? How did you use your conceptual framework to design your research and analyze your findings?

Reference

Bloomberg, L. D and Volpe, M: Completing your qualitative dissertation: A Roadmap from Beginning to End (Sage 2016).

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