Are you preparing for your PhD defence/viva? Practice answering these questions

When I prepared for my PhD defence at the beginning of this year, I made a list of some of the questions I believed my opponent or grading committee would have asked me. They ended up asking me some of them, plus many others which I did not envision. However, for the "new" questions, in some cases the preparation helped, but in other cases, only deep listening and sharp dialectics can help produce the answer that brings the discussion to the next level. Hence, preparing for "easy-to-forecast" questions is not at all the holy grail that grants access to the perfect defence/viva (and by the way, how unrealistic - to the point of being boring - would it look like if the defence was "perfect"?). However, this preparation would help your brain quickly switch on to chunk of ready-made "discussion pieces", "insights", "examples", that can be reused across several questions and that would make the whole discussion much smoother.

For PhD students who are preparing for a defence/viva, answering the list of questions I prepared for myself might be:

EITHER

nothing of revolutionary, in general, but a good exercise overall: PhD students use this preparation strategy too, and a former PhD student (Dr Eva Simonsen) working in my former university department kindly shared her list with me. If you are on the front of "the prepared ones", the list you are about to read might add a couple of questions, which you might not have thought of, to your own list. Furthermore, if you have a PhD defence/viva trial, your tentative opponent/tentative grading committee are going to ask you questions that, if not properly addressed in your dissertation, might be asked in details during the defence/viva. These type of questions will be part of your own list too.

OR

helpful, and, at some point, quiet life[defence]saving, for a few: some PhD students prepare very well on the presentation side, but might need some help on the defence side. The list that I am posting in this article is mainly for them.

I tried to formulate the questions in a way that makes them applicable to every PhD student, although some questions are clearly applicable to students in applied sciences only, and in the engineering field. Back in the day, in the end of my brainstorming, this list happened to be made of 100+ questions. Thanks to a well-trained inductive thinking that many PhD students bring out in their theory building phase, I had grouped the questions in 6 categories:

Science and research

Motivation to do research

Research scoping and research landscape

Research methods

Case studies

Results and contributions

Plus, I had included two sections that pertained my field specifically:

• Corporate sustainability
• Sustainability assessment

Note: I'll dedicate a separate LinkedIn post for the two sustainability-related categories above. This post pertains the first six general categories only and illustrates 50 questions within them.

So, let's get started.

Science and research

1) What is science?

2) What is the scientific method? (the answer to this question is a sort of corollary of the answer to question 1)

3) What is the purpose of research?

4) Can you articulate why you changed your worldview over the course of your research? How did this change affect your epistemological approach?

5) Do you believe your research says “the truth” on your topic? (--> discussion on validity and reliability)

6) How do you falsify your conclusions? (-->obvious for quantitative studies, not so obvious for qualitative studies)

All questions related to ontology & epistemology you might have already envisioned can be enclosed in the above list.

Motivations to do research

7) Why are you a researcher/why did you decide to be a PhD student?

8) Why are you researching on <topic X>?

9) Should a researcher have a vision driving his/her research? If yes, why? If no, why?

10) What defines “relevance” in research?

11) Why is your research relevant?

12) If you could fund your future research with unlimited amount of time and money, what would you research on?

Research scoping and research landscape

13) Why such broad/narrow research questions? What are the pros and cons of this choice of yours?

14) Can you name some research groups/scholars that are contributing to knowledge in your field? Can you clearly discriminate your approach/worldview from theirs? 

15) Who are the scholars who could be interested in your work besides the ones you cited in your dissertation?

16) <topic X> (in applied sciences) Can you pinpoint the difference between <topic X> as research discipline and <topic X> as practice today?

17) (For mature research topics) Why did you position yourself in such a mature field? 

18) What is the socio-technical system you analyse? (--> relevant for engineering and social sciences)

19) Are you a researcher who studies hard systems or soft systems? 

20) Why didn’t you use <X theory>, since it seems to me that <X theory> is useful for you to address your goal? (--> justification of research delimitations/scope being chosen).

21) In the prospect of being effective contributor, why did you limit yourself to this research scope? (--> justification of the research delimitations/scope being chosen).

Research methods

22) How do you do an "exploration with a purpose"? (--> alternation of rigorous design of the research with openness to change variables of the design when required. It can also be interpreted as the appropriateness in using grounded theory vs an a-priori approach in relation to the research goal).

23) In your research, what is the difference between your research design and your actual research process? (--> This question partly overlaps with the previous question).

24a) (In applied sciences) Why did you choose such a descriptive approach in designing and delivering your research, since the problem you analysed is relevant nowadays and requires intervention?

24b) (In applied sciences) Why did you choose such a prescriptive approach in designing and delivering your research? What are the risks for a researcher in being so prescriptive?

25) Is your literature review truly systematic?

26) (In case of qualitative data coding) How did you check whether your codes were reliable? (--> alternative formulation: "Can we trust your results?")

27) (For mixed-methods researchers) Can you shed a light on why mixed-methods research is the way to go for tackling your research questions?

28) (For mixed-methods researchers) What would have happened to your conclusions if you had been a completely qualitative researcher? What if you approached your topic as a statistician instead?

29) (For researchers using modelling and simulation software) Are there any mechanisms within the <piece of software> that are part of a black box to you and that may have compromised the validity and reliability of your results? From a research-design perspective, how did you secure validity and reliability of your conclusions?

30) In retrospect, what would you have done differently? ( --> possibility to adopt an alternative method for data collection, data analysis, verification and validation in relation to the goal of the study/research, e.g., ethnographic study instead of focus group for data-collection purposes...Why? Why not?).

31) (For method/tool developers) Why didn’t you continue/iterate the development of a certain existing tool/method rather than creating a new one? (--> if looking at this question from a quantitative perspective, this question fits within the discussion of academia & publishers offering no or low incentives in carrying out replication studies).

32) (For method/tool developers) As a scientist, what are the threats of pragmatism [pragmatic worldview] in the method-development process?

Case studies

For researchers building theories from case studies. This section can be considered a sub-section of "research methods"

33) Why did you use the case study as research methodology?

In case of case studies carried out in companies

34) What is the difference between a case study and a company case? Given the goal of your research, when does a company case become a case study?

35) What theories did you consider "universal" vs "contingent" within your case studies? How does your worldview on the matter affect the validity of your results? (Note: in management and leadership literature, there is an ongoing "universality vs contingency" academic debate)

36) How did you set the collaboration with the companies? Can you justify the sampling technique you adopted?

37) (For studies including observations) Would increased duration/frequency of observations have provided an incremental benefit to the validity of your results? If yes, why didn't you observe the case study for a longer time overall?

38) (In case of interviews/focus groups/ethnographic studies) Are you confident about the demographics of the people you chose for your data collection?

39) (In case of low engagement from industrial partners) What would have improved the level of engagement of companies/industrial partners?

Results and contributions

40) Your research: what’s your elevator pitch?

41) What is the new knowledge that you created? (--> It seems to be an obvious question to answer, but it might not be so for researchers whose research is deeply applied in a certain industry)

In connection with the previous question

42) Can you boil your contribution to knowledge down to one point?

43) (For paper-based dissertations) How confident are you in the ability of the papers you appended in your dissertation to show and support your conclusions?

44) Do you have future publications in your pipeline?

45) What assumption, if removed, would destabilise your results? How easily can this assumption fail to exist now or in the future?

46) In relation to results/preliminary conclusions reached by other researchers working in your field, can you explain how similar/different your results are from theirs? 

47) What's the main message you would like give to the main external (outside academia) stakeholder using the results of your research?

48) Research-to-practice gap: Do you believe that your research has contributed/will contribute to shorten this gap?

49) How would you formulate a future research agenda for your field?

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50) (From me, writing this post) Are you ready to shine at your defence?