Structure of a dissertation. James Atherton. These notes originate from my efforts to help an old friend undertaking a taught Master's course, at a university which seemed to devise its regulations around the key principle that under no circumstances should, or could, a supervisor be helpful. Quite reasonably he asked how he was supposed to know that? This is a game he would only play once, whereas supervisors and assessors and external examiners are familiar with it. I had just assumed that it already existed in practically every text on Research Methods, but on the basis of the sample I have consulted. Thanks. Note that these are general remarks, and that they are trumped by any specific rubrics from the awarding institution. As discussed here, they apply most clearly to dissertations within broadly social studies and to a lesser extent humanities, where, however, there may be more scope for variation. Pagination, for example, may need to be in a standard form; roman numerals up to (and sometimes including) the Introduction, and standard (arabic) thereafter; or standard and continuous throughout. There are several short components to these preliminaries, probably including. Search the history of over 294 billion web pages on the Internet. Introduction. Alcohol now accounts for 10% of the UK burden of disease and death, making alcohol one of the three biggest lifestyle risk factors for disease. A modern Industrial Strategy. The Industrial Strategy green paper published on 23 January 2017 sets out the following 10 pillars on which to build a new Industrial. Popular Posts. Disney Family Game Night. The Best Disney Cupcakes. Top 10 Disney Princess Recipes for your #DisneyWeekend. The Ultimate Disney Pizza Party. It first aired on the Fox. Title page, including. Title of dissertation. In the event that the dissertation refers to your own previously published or submitted work, here is where to draw attention to how you will refer to it. Best to mention others in the research group or team (as a rough rule of thumb, if you were to publish any of the dissertation as an article, who would you. Writing a good one is quite a craft and there is no. It makes sense to give a word count at the end of. Check too just where it needs. I won't say more on this because this is not about how to do your dissertation but about how to write it up, but suffice it to say that aims and subsidiary aims or objectives are critical. The. context of the work; the reader needs to get a handle on what this is about as. There is. no premium on a marker asking herself, . What it meant by ? In turn this may lead into.. Each can be spelt out and then commented on for a paragraph or so. Do this with a view to re- visiting them in the conclusion. There is nothing sacrosanct about the order in which they are. Exclusions: you have to get these in somewhere, and up- front is the best place; . On this occasion, however, attention is directed at.. After consultation, I have decided to adopt a first- person narrative voice.. It needs to be comprehensive, but obviously in areas which have already been well- researched, it is not going to be possible to include everything ever written about the topic. Indeed, as a marker I am inclined to distrust too many brief allusions to (sometimes obscure) studies; they may well suggest an over- reliance on secondary sources, and it is difficult to do justice to research and scholarship at Master. That is not a good basis, unsurprisingly. It may make sense to you, but. Alternatives are: Up- date Feb 2. There is an excellent discussion of how to tackle the ordering of material, with examples in Pinker (2. And his chapter 2 on the . Start with the first. Their work will however be addressed only indirectly. It is now. twenty years old, and so it is discussed in terms of its effects on later. Similarly.. Many social phenomena, for example, have been viewed through positivist, marxist, interactionist, constructivist and post- modern lenses. Generally speaking you simply need enough typical examples to illustrate the point, and to show where your contribution lies on the map. This is of course what you need to do if you are seeking to replicate or test the validity of earlier findings, perhaps with a different population, or in a different cultural context, or after a lapse of time. It is a warm- up for the main empirical show. Generally speaking, apart from the . Some of it may involve outlining philosophical or even methodological principles which underpin what you are doing. It is a slightly moot point as to where that discussion should sit; my preference is generally to find it in this chapter (clearly demarcated, of course, and possibly preceding the accounts of substantive research so that you can refer back to the implications of the principles. Sometimes, however, where the points are quite specific and technical and not really up for debate, they can be dealt with comfortably within the Methodology chapter. This has the advantage of allowing the student to concentrate on the methods she is actually planning to use, and usually to get formative feedback before working on the dissertation itself. I can usually tell when the chapter starts with, . Quantitative methods are defined by Cohen, Manion and Morrison (2. And I already know a lot of other stuff people trot out which is not worthy of getting within a mile of a dissertation. That may. . Its. academic or professional nature (is it about creating knowledge for its own. Its. organisational context and how that might influence the methods available. Is. it undertaken on behalf of management or a sponsor, and what say do they have. Is it subject to any additional ethics approval beyond the university? This is getting rather technical for a guide like this, so what follows is indicative for a survey- based project, because the protocol for that is the most formal. Sample construction. Survey method; on- line, phone, personal contact, mail.. Addressing independent variables; questions on age and sex (and occupation, ethnicity) and how (and when) they are posed .. Addressing dependent variables. You do not need to go into detail for every question in the questionnaire or interview schedule, but the questions on the dependent variables need to show a clear line of accountability from the original research. How people. can leave this out. But it is best if you can start the writing and re- writing of this chapter while you are actually designing (no, what you did for Research Methods is not a substitute) as well as reviewing after the event; that way the chapter becomes a device for checking progress. The actual results belong in the next chapter, but the choice of processing methods belongs here. Include inter al.. Statistical techniques adopted, including significance testing. Markers do understand such things.)The structure will of course vary from discipline to discipline; one correspondent from medical science, for example, differentiates more than I have done between the methodological considerations. These need to be set out in a clear and distinct section at the end of the chapter. There are some excellent points about different approaches to writing the Methods Chapter in Pat Thomson's blog. Findings and Discussion. Whether you deal with these separately or together will depend very much on the kind of research you have undertaken, and so it is harder to be prescriptive about the structure of these chapter(s); what follow are mostly simply suggestions. Raw findings easily become fragmented and hard to follow, which is why you may need to discuss and evaluate them as you are going along rather than delay the findings until you have set out all your wares. Did you include questions about independent variables such as age and sex etc., so that you could determine the fit between your sample and the overall population? It is way beyond the brief of this paper to go into reasons and solutions, but frankly many non- scientists appear too frightened of maths to engage properly with statistics and failure to make appropriate use of quantitative techniques accounts for the poor quality even of some published research in the social . The referencing of material in appendices is critical, and it is worth getting to grips with automatic cross- referencing in your word- processor, so that when you edit you do not lose track. And for the marker. This chapter is probably the easiest in the entire dissertation for the reader to misunderstand, often by confusing just which part of the evidence a point belongs to. On the whole that works better for interview- based data than for questionnaires, because in the case of the latter the interesting material comes largely from the cross- tabulation of answers to two or more questions, so it is not always clear in what order to take them. That is fine, as long as you signpost the strategy. This is the heart of the dissertation. This is where you tie together the research questions or hypotheses, the data you have unearthed, and the previous research and models and arguments. In a sense, anything goes in this chapter, except that if it is separate from the Findings, there should be no new information or data. It is all about the potential meaning(s) of data you have already reported, whether yours or that of previous researchers. Moving away from. Oakeshott. You have led the reader systematically through the research process, and this is where you can point out what it all adds up to: if you have done it properly, you are now expert and you have earned the right to be heard. If the research design did not prove up to the task, say why and how that qualifies the results; if the survey suffered from a poor response rate, don. The marker will already have noticed these limitations anyway, so there is no point in trying to conceal them, but you show your professionalism by the way you address them. That is not necessarily a Bad Thing; you will not be randomly wrong, and the questions will have been formulated in relation to the previous research and scholarship, so the results can still be interesting and useful. But once again, do not. That is the climax! The loop is closed. Where to from here? What. questions are posed which are worthy of further study? For most people. questions need answers; for academics, questions pose more questions. The traditional conclusion for a dissertation is. It should be second. Appendices. There are policy matters to resolve about how much evidence to include in appendices, and guidance from your supervisor is important here (as of course it is throughout).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
August 2017
Categories |