Scope is the definition of the edges of our study. We could study the whole world. Hey, why stop there? We could study the entire universe! That would be a broad scope for a social scientist. I don’t recommend biting off that much topic. In fact, I suggest narrowing the scope of your project—a lot.
Scope is what you have after you’ve set your delimitations. What are delimitations? Hey, thanks for asking. Delimitations are restrictions we purposely implement to reduce the breadth and width our study. For example, we might delimit our study to one local geographical area or to one subset of a population.
Here’s my story. When I set about studying academic quality in for-profit vocational programs, I planned to talk to students, faculty, administrators, and employers. After some iterations (and replacements of committee members), I settled on a phenomenological approach to exploring academic quality through the perspectives of these four groups. How cool, I thought!
“Not so fast,” said my new Chair. “Do you realize what a monumental data analysis task you are creating for yourself?”
“I can do it,” I stubbornly replied.
I was enthusiastic until I started writing up my research plan in my dissertation proposal. As I forged through my plan, I began to see what I nightmare I was in for if I had four groups to compare. I was running out of time in my program. How on earth would I be able to synthesize the results of qualitative interviews from four groups of stakeholders in less than six months?
When I hesitantly suggested we cut out employers, my Chair said, Why not just study faculty? As long as you can explain why they alone are being studied, one group is sufficient for a doctoral project. Hallelujah. I made the decision to cut back to just one group, faculty. It was the moment when things began to fall into place.
I narrowed the scope even further. I could have interviewed faculty who taught at private nonprofit and public institutions, in addition to faculty who taught at for-profit institutions. That would have been a different study. I delimited my study to only for-profit faculty. I could have tried to find faculty in different cities. I didn’t have the resources to do that, so I delimited my study to only one metropolitan region. I could have done a mixed-methods survey to expose the definitions of academic quality generated by my small qualitative sample to a larger quantitative sample. That project was too big for me, and more to the point, not necessary, so I delimited my study to one qualitative approach with one small sample of faculty.
If you think about it, in the sense I just described, our problem and research questions are delimitations, and those delimitations define the scope of our study. We identify the boundaries we’ve placed on our research in terms of who we are studying (our sample) and how we are studying them (our methodology and method). Your reviewers will likely ask you to justify your delimitations. Why did you choose that place, those people, rather than other places and other people?
Too broad a scope is a problem I often see in the papers I edit. I get it. It’s tempting to want to get your arms around all facets of a problem. It’s like we feel obligated to throw in the kitchen sink to earn the doctorate. You may want to challenge yourself, take the road less traveled, yada yada. That’s great, and we applaud you, you trail blazer, you. But just so you know: It’s not necessary to earn the degree. Your narrow, well-defined study will be more likely to receive approval than a vast panoramic study of the entire Chinese supply chain, or the U.S. public school system, or whatever.
Reviewers don’t always catch a poorly defined scope. Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to study the experiences of Oregon high school students who failed the high school exit exam. Perhaps your own experience with racial discrimination prompted your interest in the topic. You plan to describe the test failure experiences of students of color, disabled students, and English language learners (ELLs). However, in your literature review, you focus primarily on the group with whom you most strongly identify: the students of color and barely mention the disabled and ELL students. Then, in the last few paragraphs, you add another group to your plan: low socioeconomic status students, without remembering to mention them in your problem, purpose, and research questions. It’s so easy to fall prey to scope creep!
That’s why I recommend, when you describe the problem for a doctoral dissertation, keep the focus and scope tight and narrow. Later you can study other groups. If you didn’t limit the scope in your proposal, and somehow that got by your reviewers, you can still attempt to manage the scope when you write your manuscript by defining your terms and describing your study’s limitations with strict clarity.
If you need some help, check out my book.
