The content analysis of PhD. Dissertations of Public Administration at Tarbiat Modares, Tehran, Allameh Tabatabai and Science and Research Unit of Islamic Azad University: (1380 – 1396)

This study is aimed at analyzing the content of Public Administration’s PhD. dissertations of Iranian premier universities that were defended in a period of (2001- 2017).  Having capacity to promote the society’s scientific  needs of theory building,  doctoral   dissertations may also help to improve the policy makers and the executive branch administrators and the government managers to better decide and perform their duties. Since, in recent decades, the size of  P. A. doctoral courses and its students have been  growing at Iranian universities, the study of the quality of existing doctoral dissertations from both  theory and practice  point of view, seems to be indispensable. The statistical population of this research was PhD. Dissertations of Pubic Administration that were written and defended in a period of fifteen years at four premier public universities of Iran (Tehran, Tarbiat Modares, Allameh Tabatabaei) and Science and Research Unit of Islamic Azad University. The sample size of the research was 201 that has been obtained   from Morgan’s table. The research is basic in terms of the audience (scientific community), non-reactive in terms of method, descriptive in terms of the goal and cross-sectional in terms of time. In this non-reactive archival study, we had access to directly observe dissertations which are available in the form of library documents. Findings show that quantitative researches are more popular than qualitative ones, there is about  no connection between the researches topics to the country’s administrative, economic, political and social events and no  critical discourse among the dissertation writers.