Dissertation

Your dissertation, the last academic milestone for the PhD degree, is the final demonstration of your scholarly, research, and professional abilities during your doctoral studies. It should provide an original contribution to knowledge in the field.

Dissertation Committee

Your Dissertation Committee is required to have a Chair or Co-Chairs; one Academic Senate Representative chosen from outside the department; and Additional Members. Additional members may be added to meet the requirement that at least half of the members of all higher degree committees must be members of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate in the student’s degree granting program. Your Dissertation Chair cannot be the same person who served as your Qualifying Paper/Qualifying Exam Committee Chair, unless they are co-chairing the Dissertation Committee.

Both faculty and students alike should be aware of the requirements governing selection of the Dissertation Committee members described in the Graduate Division’s policy on Faculty Committees for Higher Degrees.

A student’s choice of a Dissertation Chair is critical for completion of the doctorate. Dissertation Chairs also play an important role in assisting students in finding satisfying and appropriate career positions. The Dissertation Chair should discuss at length with the student the implications of the selected topic in terms of the development of the field and the topic’s significance.

Further meetings during the dissertation phase are strongly encouraged; you should continue to consult regularly with your committee members and keep them informed of the progress of your work. Some topics that should be discussed early in the process include (but are not limited to):

  • Discussion regarding the role of each member on the committee.
  • Discussion regarding data access, permissions, human subjects, and analysis.
  • Discussion regarding timelines for completion.
  • Discussion regarding communication among and between committee members concerning student progress and standards for completion.
  • Discussion regarding publishing or presenting parts of your dissertation.

For further guidance please consult Appendix C: Faculty Mentor Guidelines, Appendix D: Faculty-Student Authorship Guidelines, and the Guide to Graduate Policy F3.9 Faculty and Student Interaction During the Dissertation Process.

Dissertation Research Involving Human Subjects

If your dissertation research will involve human subjects in any way, approval of a human subjects protocol must be procured from the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects (CPHS)BEFORE any dissertation research is conducted. The CPHS serves as the Institutional Review Board (IRB) for UC Berkeley. The CPHS offers guidelines for preparing your protocol, submission deadlines, meeting dates, and forms and instructions for research investigators.

There is no provision for CPHS to give retroactive approval of research. Applications involving greater than minimal risk for subjects will go to full committee review and must be submitted to the CPHS at least 4 weeks prior to the regularly scheduled monthly meeting. Applications for expedited or exempt categories of review are processed in order of receipt. The review process can be a lengthy one, sometimes taking 2-3 months to complete. Plan adequate time for the review and approval process. Conducting research out of compliance with these protocols is grounds for dismissal.

How to File Your Dissertation

Social Welfare doctoral candidates planning to file a dissertation should provide a completed draft to all of their committee members AT LEAST TWO MONTHS IN ADVANCE of their anticipated filing date. Additionally, candidates should check with their committee members to determine if this is sufficient time; it may not be. Candidates should also anticipate that they will be asked to make at least one round of revisions.

In order to protect faculty from the pressure of rush reviews and students from unreasonable delays in feedback, the Doctoral Committee has established three weeks as the expected time between a committee member's receipt of a draft and its return to the student. You should, however, discuss this matter with your committee chair to determine if scheduling constraints will make an alternate time period necessary.

It is Graduate Council policy that the signature of a faculty member on a dissertation signature approval page is binding and cannot be withdrawn once it has been given. The faculty member should not sign a dissertation until he or she is convinced that the student’s work has been completed to the faculty member’s satisfaction. Disagreements among committee members should be resolved according to Graduate Division Policies for Disagreements Regarding Acceptability of a Student’s Dissertation.

If you plan use of your own previously published and/or co-authored material in your dissertation, you must seek permission from Graduate Division.  Please review Graduate Division's Policies and Procedures: Permission to Include Previous Published or Co-Authored Material.

If you wish to include publishable papers or article length essays within your disseration, please review Graduate Division's Policy: Inclusion of Publishable Papers or Articles-Length Essays.

After you have written your dissertation, formatted and assembled it correctly, and obtained your final approval signatures, you are ready to file it with UC Berkeley’s Graduate Division. No additional "oral defense" of your dissertation is required, although students are strongly encouraged to offer a brief oral presentation or poster of their dissertation findings at the annual Haviland Scholars Day celebration held every spring in the School of Social Welfare.

All doctoral dissertations are to be submitted electronically. For all of the requirements for preparing the manuscript for submission, please see the Graduate Division’s Dissertation Filing Guidelines.