Methodology of Governance Studies

The growing interest in governance in society requires understanding and improving the methods of acquiring knowledge in the governance discipline. This research was organized to examine the methodology of Ph.D. dissertations on the subject of governance. In terms of purpose, this research is applied, and in terms of the nature of data and method of analysis, it is among qualitative research. In this research, research data has been collected and analyzed using meta-synthesis (Sandolski and Barroso's seven-step method). In this research, the registration unit is dissertations  and the unit of analysis is the clause. 425 dissertations  were selected as the statistical population from valid databases and were selected by targeted sampling method, screening and 40 documents (as research samples) for analysis. MAXQDA 2020 software was used to analyze the content of the documents. Based on the results, the methodology used in many research is the qualitative method. Most of these researches have been applied, they have used the library method and interviews to collect data and to select the statistical population, experts have been used, and they have used a targeted non-random method to select the statistical sample. The examined treatises mainly used the thematic analysis method as a research strategy and re-interview method for validation. According to this research, it is recommended to conduct research in non-economic areas focused on the real issues of governance in the country, to pay attention to the country's native context in governance studies and methodology, and to include governance research in research budgets.