On November 30, 2023, the School of Public Administration invited Prof. Li Wei from the School of Public Administration of Central China Normal University to give a lecture on the topic of “How to write a doctoral thesis”. More than 30 teachers and students from the school participated in this lecture. Vice Dean Prof. Li Wenbin hosted the seminar.

Professor Li Wei believes that doctoral thesis has four elements, namely interesting research questions, in-depth theoretical dialogue, standardized research design, and detailed survey data. Then, according to his own experience, he shared four aspects of the doctoral thesis question raising, analysis and demonstration, field investigation, and theoretical value interpretation. During this period, he put forward some unique insights that deeply resonated with the teachers and students present. For example, two design ideas can be adopted for case studies, one is to find differences from the same cases, and the other is to find similarities from different cases. The theoretical value of the doctoral thesis should be explained in three parts of the thesis, namely, the literature review , the analysis framework design and the conclusion and discussion.

Prof. Li Wei shared profound and unique views, and teachers and students present benefited a lot. In the Q&A session, Teacher Li gave detailed answers to questions such as the typicality and representativeness of the cases selected and the theoretical significance of the research questions. Finally, Vice Dean Prof. Li Wenbin summarized the lecture and stressed to the students present: to do case studies, we must have rigorous research design, long-term tracking and field research experience, and we must tell the truth in the story.