Help needed from people who have written a dissertation before (medical)

[Ksandra]

So I'm helping one of my boss's friends fix her dissertation, but I've never had to write one myself (and it's for nursing and I know jack about nursing). Mostly she wanted me to fix her grammar issues (she's a native Chinese-speaker so her English fails), which has been fine, but sometimes corresponding with her is a little difficult as I try to figure out what she's saying.

Anyways to the question:

I had her change a lot of her wording to past tense since she was referencing several studies that had been done previously. It seems that she did her own study for her dissertation. I'd like to show you the paragraph:

A quantitative research method was used for this study. The rational for the research design focused on the impact of the nursing students' self-confidence levels due to different instructional methods that they received. This researcher employed a descriptive research designed to collect data through a survey, and finding the correlation from both the control and experimental groups. As Leedy & Ormrod (2005) stated, descriptive research simply focuses on exploring the correlation among two or more phenomena. The correlation in this study emphasized the changes on student's confidence levels between the two different learning methods. As Leedy & Ormrod (2005) described, the correlation occurs when there is a change in one variable, it causes a decrease or increase in another variable.

She received a note back from her dissertation mentor stating

You should not use past tense until you have completed the study,

This brings me question: is it common to hand in a dissertation with an uncompleted study? I assume that what must be happening is she is writing her dissertation at the same time as doing her study, BUT by the time she has handed in her dissertation the study would have been finished. Meaning, from a grammar standpoint, it should be written in past tense for the reader.

Like I said though I have never had to write a dissertation before, and medical/science papers can be a little different than an English one, so figured I'd see if anyone had an info to give. (especially because of her mentor's note)

Is it assumed with medical dissertations that the study you did gets put into future even though you would have finished it by the time it is handed in? I sent her an email asking whether or not her study would be done by the time the paper is handed in, I'll let you know when she responds, since this is a timed thing though I wanted to try to get some info beforehand.

Thanks guys. :D

[Nystul]

BTW: change "rational" near the beginning to "rationale."

Also, if this was her project and her dissertation I'd change "this researcher" to "I" as she should be trying to claim this work.

Also again- the last sentence, she's defining correlation so I'd drop "the" before correlation. That's kind of a bad sentence. It looks like she's just defining what a correlation is- and that is certainly not a finding of a paper written in 2005 lol. As a matter of fact, both citations are basically common knowledge facts pulled out of a paper. Just kind of odd.


As for your actual question...
This may be just her adviser having a brain fart or something...Though typically the studies are done/near done when you get to the point that you're writing. Scientific papers are traditionally written in past tense so yea I'd stay with that. The exception (she would have to tell you this) would be if she participated in a small part of a much larger project that is still ongoing. Maybe that is what is going on?

[Ksandra]

BTW: change "rational" near the beginning to "rationale."

Also, if this was her project and her dissertation I'd change "this researcher" to "I" as she should be trying to claim this work.

This may be just her adviser having a brain fart or something...Though typically the studies are done/near done when you get to the point that you're writing. Scientific papers are traditionally written in past tense so yea I'd stay with that. The exception (she would have to tell you this) would be if she participated in a small part of a much larger project that is still ongoing. Maybe that is what is going on?

hmm thanks for the catches, I'm having to correct them rather quickly so I am sure I probably have missed more things than I should have ;_;

Good point on the larger project, I'll ask her that too. Problem like I said is her English is pretty bad so sometimes I have to guess on what she's telling me. I'll see if maybe that's it. Thanks!

[Nystul]

I edited my original post with another comment.

Let me know if you have any other questions. I wrote my masters thesis last year.