Policies for assigning faculty members to supervise students' thesis and dissertation projects can vary from one institution to another and even across departments within the same institution.

In some cases, the advisor who guides a student's general academic progress automatically becomes the supervisor of the candidate's work on the thesis or dissertation. Under such a policy, students are relieved of the responsibility of choosing a mentor, but they may unfortunately end up with less than optimal help. In other cases, an academic advisor will not automatically be assigned, but he or she will be only one of a group of several faculty members from whom a student can choose a guide. Under these circumstances, before students announce their choice of a mentor they can profitably collect several kinds of information about the professors who form the pool of potential advisors. Included among the sources of information are fellow students, the professors within the pool, other faculty members, secretaries, research assistants, and the professors' publications.

Institutions and departments can also differ in the number of faculty members assigned to supervise and evaluate a student's research. One common pattern at the master's level is to have a three-member committee for each thesis, with the committee chairperson acting as the candidate's principal supervisor. However, in colleges and universities with large numbers of master's degree students, the entire master's project may be directed and assessed by a single faculty member. At the doctoral level, the supervising committee often consists of three to five professors.

In the following paragraphs, we describe kinds of information to seek about potential advisers. We then suggest useful sources of each kind.

Kinds of Information to Collect

In learning about the professors in your pool of potential mentors, you will likely find it helpful to discover their (a) fields of interest and expertise, (b) style of advising, and (c) attitudes about appropriate research topics and methods of research.

Fields of interest and expertise

Obviously, the closer an advisor's area of expertise is to your research problem, the better equipped she or he will be to identify difficulties you may encounter, recommend sources of information pertinent to your topic, and guide your choice of methods for gathering and interpreting data. There are several ways to learn about faculty members' specializations--the titles and contents of classes they teach, their published books and articles, the topics of theses and dissertations produced under their guidance, other staff members' opinions, and other students' experiences with those faculty members.

The task of deciding how well a potential advisor's interests and skills suit your needs is likely easiest if you already have a specific research problem in mind, or at least if you have identified the general realm you hope to explore. If you have no inkling of the kind of topic on which your study will focus, then the next of our selection criteria--style of advising--may become your primary concern.

Style of advising

Professors vary greatly in how they work with students on theses and dissertations. Those at one end of a monitoring scale closely control each phase of the student's effort, in some cases dictating what is to be done at every step, then requiring the student to hand in each portion of material for evaluation and correction. Advisors at the opposite end of the scale tell students to work things out pretty much by themselves and to finish a complete draft of the project before handing it in for inspection.

Advisors also vary in how available they are when students need them. Some are frequently away from the campus. Some require students to make an appointment with a department secretary several days or weeks ahead of time in order to confer about the individual's research. Others allow students to drop by the office or to phone any time they need help. Some answer queries only in their office. Others permit students to phone them at home.

Professors also differ in the way they offer advice and criticism. Some are blunt about the shortcomings of a student's effort, perhaps derisive and abusive. Others are direct in pointing out weaknesses in the candidate's work, but they do so in a kindly, understanding manner, recognizing that doing serious research is a new endeavor for the student and that mistakes along the way are not only expected but can function as valuable learning opportunities. Yet others are so cautious about potentially hurting a student's feelings that they are reluctant to point out weaknesses in the project and thereby fail to guide their advisees toward correcting the shortcomings of their efforts.Consequently, you will likely find it useful to learn ahead of time about faculty members' styles of directing theses and dissertations--about how closely they monitor steps in the process, how available they are to offer help, and how skillfully they identify deficiencies and suggest solutions without unduly damaging students' egos.Your best sources of information about advising styles are usually (a) fellow graduate students who are farther along than you are in the thesis or dissertation process and (b) other professors whom you know personally and who are willing to talk about their colleagues' modes of guidance.

Attitudes toward topics and methodology

Faculty members often disagree about what constitutes proper research. Consequently, you might end up with an advisor whose notions of suitable research topics and methods of investigation are at odds with your own beliefs. Therefore, three types of information you may wish to seek are your potential advisors' views of (a) quantitative-versus-qualitative methods, (b) positivism-versuspostmodernism perspectives, and (c) basic-versus-applied research.

Quantitative-versus-qualitative methods:

As these terms are generally used, quantitative research involves amounts, which are usually cast in the form of statistics, but qualitative research does not involve amounts in any strict sense. Here are titles of projects that might be categorized under each type:

Professors who locate themselves exclusively in the quantitative camp demand that students' research involve the compilation of data in the form of amounts. Hence, they reject historical chronicles, philosophical analyses, a line of logic leading to a conclusion, a comparison of the qualities of different societies, the detailed description of an individual's or group's style of life, and the like. Furthermore, adherents of quantitative studies sometimes prefer studies that focus on rather large numbers of people, schools, cities, or political constituencies so that broadly inclusive generalizations can be drawn from the research results. Such adherents thus disapprove of studies focusing on one autistic person (singlesubject research) or only a few subjects (three autistic children, two schools, four candidates for political office, five neighborhoods) whose results cannot, with confidence, be generalized to a wide range of people or events. Proponents of quantitative studies tend to prefer such research methods as controlled experiments and surveys that employ interviews, tests, systematic observations, questionnaires, and quantitative content analysis. (For arguments supporting the quantitative position, see the following references: Howell, 1997; Shavelson, 1996.)

In contrast, professors who subscribe strictly to qualitative methodology tend to belittle research that involves what they may refer to as "no more than number crunching" which they feel oversimplifies complex causes, dehumanizes evidence, and fails to recognize individual differences among people, among environments, and among events. Advocates of qualitative studies tend to favor such research techniques as historical and philosophical analyses, descriptive observation, case studies, ethnography, and hermeneutics. (For rationales supporting the qualitative stance, see: Bogdan & Knopp, 1992; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994.)

There are, in addition to the foregoing two polar positions, a great many faculty members who will accept a wide array of research approaches, quantitative and qualitative alike. We would count ourselves among their number because, in our opinion, the quantitative-versus-qualitative controversy is really off target. The issue, in our minds, should not be: Are quantitative methods better than qualitative, or vice versa? Instead, the issue should be: Which approach-quantitative, qualitative, or some combination of both--will be the most suitable for answering the particular research question being asked? This point of view, which respects the contributions that can be made by all sorts of methods, is the one we espouse throughout this book.

However, to be practical about your own situation as a student pursuing a degree in a particular department, what we as the authors of this book believe about the quantitative-qualitative debate is really not important. What is important is how well your own beliefs match those of the advisors with whom you might conduct your research. Thus, a useful twofold question to ask is: Which research methodologies do the potential members of my research-project committee prefer or even accept? And how well do my own preferences match the opinions of those professors? In effect, establishing a good match promotes efficiency, effectiveness, and goodwill in your work with advisors.

Positivism versus postmodernism:

Somewhat linked to the quantitativequalitative dispute in recent decades is the oftentimes acrimonious controversy between academicians who subscribe to a positivist worldview and those who style themselves as postmodernists. It is also possible to identify a position that is intermediate between the positivism and postmodernism, a position sometimes labeled postpositivism. You may find it useful to learn where in this controversy your potential advisors locate themselves so that you will know how closely their opinions coincide with your own.There is too little space available here to delve thoroughly into the positivistpostmodernist debate. Thus, we limit the following discussion to identifying five components of each position--(a) the nature of reality, (b) the aim of research, (c) the question of validity, (d) the nature and function of research results, and (e) how to understand reality. At the outset, we admit that defining positivism, postpositivism, and postmodernism will invite a good deal of contention, because writers frequently fail to agree on what beliefs constitute each position. However, we think the following rendition does no serious violence to the core convictions held by typical members of each camp, and thus it should adequately serve our present purpose.

Positivism/Modernism.

The words modernism and positivism are so closely linked in much of present day discussion that the two terms can be considered synonymous.Positivism, and particularly the 20th century's subvariety known as logical positivism, has functioned over the past two centuries as the principal paradigm guiding the conduct of modern science ( Toulmin, 1994). Here are typical assumptions on which a positivist or modernist worldview is founded:

Most of the social science disciplines have experienced an eruption of internal "crises" over the past several decades. . . . To many in the disciplines, social scientific knowledge seems to have had only limited relevance for understanding societal problems, whether those involve social behavior such as school learning and interpersonal violence, or community and institution conditions such as poverty, unemployment, and racial segregation. Another common theme--of particular concern in psychology--has been the contextual character of research findings, the fact that the accumulated body of knowledge tends not to be situated, not to be conceptually and empirically connected to the properties and texture of the social settings in which it was obtained. A third theme reflecting discontent in the social sciences is the failure to accommodate human subjectivity in inquiry and to attend to the role of meaning in behavior, in development, and in social life. ( Jessor, 1996, p. 4)

Because many of the critics have only revised--not completely abandoned--a positivist perspective, they have been dubbed postpositivists. The following precepts typify the postpositivist paradigm ( Campbell, 1996; Shweder, 1996).

 The Social-Class System of a Seaside Village 

Once you've obtained a principal advisor, you may discover that he or she is unsuitable, for any of the reasons noted in Table 2-1. To extricate yourself from this relationship, you may find it useful to find another faculty member who would likely be a better advisor. You can explain your plight to this potential "new" advisor and ask that he or she take you on as an advisee. Such an interview is best attempted before you have actually broken your connection with the professor whom you deem unsuitable. The "new" advisor may be willing to help arrange the transition from the "old" to the "new" mentor with as little unpleasantness as possible.