How To Do A Dissertation Research: An Approach For Beginners
Your dissertation is the most important work of your academic career to date, possibly the most important work you will ever do. Not only does it present you with the opportunity to perform original research, it is also your advertisement for your potential employers.
You need to get this right. So how do you set about the overwhelming task of shifting through the information overload that is the modern information superhighway?
A Guide to Research
- - What are you interested in? What was the reason you chose to follow this course of study?
Check over your course work. What grabs your attention most? This is where you should concentrate your search for your research topic.
- - Take a general look at all the most recent information and work in your area of interest. Somewhere in that literature there will be gaps in the knowledge. This is where you need to focus if your fact-finding is to be original and will show you the best approach to take.
- - Having identified your area, now you need to decide exactly which method you intend to use for your work. Perhaps you could undertake an entirely literature based project? Would working on case study be best for you? On the other hand you might have noticed in a previous graduate student’s work a suggestion where extra work was needed.
- - Decide on a working title – remember to run the title and the idea past your supervisor before you go any further. He or she might be able to point out a mistake or point out an extra source you had missed.
- - As you develop your research question, make sure you understand what you intend to explore and just as importantly what you need to leave out.
- - Make an outline as you do your data trawl. See where every bit of information you find fits in with everything else.
- - Color-code (paper) hyperlink (for computer) your notes for ease of access. If your information is from the internet rather than books, make a note of the date you first found the site – information changes so rapidly you may need to check archived sites next month to retrieve what you found.
- - Do not feel tied down. If you find a better topic while you investigate the first, then shift your outline around until it fits. This is the best reason for outlining; you can see your mistakes and fix them before you have written half your paper. Anyway, you can always find a reliable case study writing help online.
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