How To Do a Dissertation in Record Time with Government Data: A Primer is written to help students in the social sciences and education do their dissertations in as few as four years from start to finish. Its purpose is to show doctoral students how to conceptualize, formulate and investigate a research problem using government data. Two data sets are used. One is the General Social Survey (GSS), which is used by social scientists and contains some of the best information available on American society. The other data used in this book is from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the gold standard for data on U.S. K-12 education. Both sets of data are free and available online.