RES 6541 Module 2 Proposal Alignment Check Example

Reading the Proposal Across Its Chapters: An Alignment Check of Chapters 1 to 3 for a Qualitative Study of First-Semester Clinical Instructors

Student Name

American College of Education

RES6541: Finalizing the Dissertation Proposal

Module 2 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 19, 2026

Introduction

A proposal can be sound in each chapter and still fail as a whole if the chapters describe slightly different studies. That risk is higher for my proposal because the method switched from questionnaire to interviews after the first drafts of Chapters 1 and 2. Module 1 revised Chapter 1. This paper checks the full proposal for alignment by following nine elements through all three chapters, recording where they matched and where they did not, and describing each correction. The method was simple but slow: I placed the relevant sentences from each chapter side by side in a working table and read across each row.

The Nine Elements Checked

The rows of the working table were the problem, the purpose, the central research question and its two subquestions, the conceptual framework, the design, the participants, data collection, data analysis and trustworthiness. For each row the table held the wording from Chapter 1, the corresponding treatment in Chapter 2 and the procedures in Chapter 3. An element was considered aligned when the three cells used the same key terms, described the same scope and could not be read as describing different studies. Three rows aligned on the first reading: the problem, the purpose and the design. Six did not.

Mismatch 1: A Survey Section Left in Chapter 2

Chapter 2 still contained a section reviewing instruments that measure teaching self-efficacy among nurse educators, written when the study planned to measure confidence. Nothing in the revised Chapter 3 uses such an instrument, and no research question asks about self-efficacy. The section was removed, and two of its studies that describe new educators' experiences were moved into the theme on the transition to teaching, where they now support the framework rather than an abandoned measure.

Mismatch 2: Two Names for the Participants

Chapter 1 now defines the participants as part-time clinical instructors, but Chapter 3 used adjunct faculty in the sampling section and clinical adjuncts in the interview protocol. The terms overlap without being identical, since some programs call per-course lecturers adjuncts even if they never supervise students on units. Using three labels for one group invites a reviewer to ask whether the study has three populations. Every reference now uses part-time clinical instructor, and the definition in Chapter 1 is repeated in the Chapter 3 eligibility criteria.

Mismatch 3: An Interview Guide Missing a Subquestion

The first subquestion asks what new instructors identify as having helped them in their first semester. When I mapped each interview question to a research question, none asked about help or support directly; the guide covered expectations, early weeks, relationships with unit staff, student supervision and difficulties. Participants might mention supports in passing, but the study could not claim to have asked. Two questions were added: one inviting participants to describe a moment when something or someone made the role easier, and a follow-up about what support they wished they had received. Each interview question is now labeled in Chapter 3 with the research question it serves.

Mismatch 4: The Recall Window

Chapter 1's limitations section names recall as a concern and describes participants as having finished their first semester within the past year. Chapter 3's eligibility criteria allowed up to two years. The longer window would make recruitment easier, but it doubles the period over which memories may fade or be reshaped by later experience. The criterion was changed to one year to match Chapter 1, and Chapter 3 now explains that this was a trade-off between recruitment and the accuracy of accounts.

Mismatch 5: The Framework's Role

Chapter 1 states that the nurse educator transition model serves as a sensitizing framework, guiding the interview and the discussion but not the coding (Schoening, 2013). Chapter 3's analysis section, however, described a coding frame built from the model's four phases, which would make the analysis deductive. The analysis section was rewritten to describe inductive coding following the phases of thematic analysis set out by Braun and Clarke (2006), with the transition model brought in only after themes are developed, when findings are compared with it in Chapter 5.

Mismatch 6: Trustworthiness Claimed but Not Planned

Chapter 1 promised that the study would meet established criteria for qualitative trustworthiness, but Chapter 3 described only member checking. Following the criteria commonly traced to Lincoln and Guba (1985), Chapter 3 now addresses credibility through member checking and peer debriefing with a doctoral colleague, transferability through thick description of program and hospital settings, dependability through a dated record of every coding choice and confirmability through a reflexive journal kept from the first interview. Nowell et al. (2017) describe how each of these can be documented at each phase of thematic analysis, and Chapter 3 now cites that guidance for the audit trail.

Rows That Aligned

The three rows that matched on first reading still received small edits. The problem statement in Chapter 1 and the gap statement at the end of Chapter 2 now use the same phrase, first semester of clinical teaching, rather than near synonyms. The purpose statement is repeated verbatim at the start of Chapter 3, as my chair recommends. The design, qualitative description, is named the same way in all three chapters and attributed to the same source (Sandelowski, 2000). Sample size reasoning in Chapter 3 now cites evidence that most themes in interview studies of a fairly homogeneous group emerged within the first twelve interviews (Guest et al., 2006), which supports the planned range of 12 to 15.

Verifying the Corrections

Corrections can introduce new mismatches, so the table was read a second time after every change had been made. That second pass caught one new problem: moving two studies from the deleted self-efficacy section into the transition theme left the Chapter 2 summary referring to a theme that no longer existed. The summary was rewritten. As a final check, a doctoral colleague who had not read the proposal before was given only the purpose statement and asked to predict the interview questions and the analysis approach. The predictions matched Chapter 3 closely, which suggests a reader can now move from the purpose to the method without surprises. The colleague also flagged that the word experience was used loosely in two places, once meaning events and once meaning feelings; both sentences were clarified.

What the Exercise Taught

The most useful lesson is that misalignment hides in the details written last: interview questions, eligibility windows and quality procedures. The large elements, problem and purpose, had been revised together and stayed consistent. Future revisions to any one chapter will now be followed by a quick pass through the working table, so that the proposal does not drift again before the research review.

Conclusion

Reading across the chapters found six mismatches that reading each chapter alone had missed: a survey remnant, inconsistent participant labels, an interview guide missing a subquestion, conflicting recall windows, a framework used two ways and trustworthiness claimed but not planned. Each has been corrected, and the working table will travel with the proposal as an appendix. Module 3 prepares the proposal for the dissertation research review.

References

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77-101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa

Guest, G., Bunce, A., & Johnson, L. (2006). How many interviews are enough? An experiment with data saturation and variability. Field Methods, 18(1), 59-82. https://doi.org/10.1177/1525822X05279903

Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. SAGE Publications.

Nowell, L. S., Norris, J. M., White, D. E., & Moules, N. J. (2017). Thematic analysis: Striving to meet the trustworthiness criteria. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917733847

Sandelowski, M. (2000). Whatever happened to qualitative description? Research in Nursing & Health, 23(4), 334-340. https://doi.org/10.1002/1098-240X(200008)23:4<334::AID-NUR9>3.0.CO;2-G

Schoening, A. M. (2013). From bedside to classroom: The nurse educator transition model. Nursing Education Perspectives, 34(3), 167-172. https://doi.org/10.5480/1536-5026-34.3.167