Achieving Originality and Conviction in a Doctoral Thesis: A Synoptic Theory of the Five-Chapter Model
Abstract
After several years of serving as external examiner for many universities in Africa and the wider world, I came to realize that many doctoral students and their supervisors are not often aware of the five-chapter thesis structure articulated by the American Psychological Association (APA) in its 2019 guidelines for academic thesis writing. Those who are aware of and follow such a structure clearly abide by the APA’s formulation that a full academic thesis report, whether at a master’s or doctoral level, should be constituted of no more than five chapters. Unfortunately, my many years of experience as external examiner for doctoral thesis in several universities in the South and other regions of Africa has shown that in universities where this norm is unknown and not followed, there is no order for guiding the doctoral students on what to do regarding how to structure their doctoral thesis chapters and how many chapters in all they should be. In that case, with the absence of such a guiding principle some students and their supervisors have at times been tempted to go overboard and submit a doctoral thesis that range from eight to more chapters in all. The principal inspiration for this article is to demonstrate for doctoral students and their emerging new supervisors how the five-chapter thesis structure model for academic thesis writing could be implemented in practice.
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