Now that you have are moving to your final draft stage, here are FAQ’s, Hints and Tips that you can use to self-review your draft dissertation. These have been covered in the Workshops
1.How many references do I need to include in my dissertation?
It is recommended that for a good quality dissertation you should aim for at least 40 different sources throughout the whole Dissertation. Although many of your cited sources will appear in the Literature Review chapter, remember to cite relevant materials throughout the whole of your dissertation. Many of your sources should be academic journal articles as these are the most relevant to a student conducting research at Honours level. The remainder of your sources may be a mix of textbooks, company reports, newspaper articles, websites, government publications and statistics etc. The exact mix will of course depend on the nature of your investigation.
2.I am struggling with my literature review. What can I do?
The exact structure will depend on the review’s focus but like any essay it should have an introduction, a middle or main body, and a conclusion. A typical literature review chapter could be laid out as follows.
▪ A general introductory section that briefly explains the main themes that you will explore in this chapter
▪ A background discussion of historical work and any key concepts, theories, models, frameworks etc. that may have been developed and adopted in practice (this may go back many years or even decades)
▪ A discussion of the key theoretical issues as they apply today (the contemporary literature) and examine these in detailing appropriate thematic subsections
▪ Finally, and most importantly, you must discuss all the material that you have read in terms of how this relates to your own study. After all this hard (and sometimes tedious) work, how does your understanding of the literature fit in with what you are hoping to discover through the research objectives that you set out in the opening chapter
3. Can you tell me more about the findings section?
Having completed the collection of data for your dissertation, you should spend some time describing the characteristics of that information before then going on to conduct more detailed analysis. Consequently, you might opt to have two chapters devoted to ‘results’: a first one describing your main data/findings and outlining the results of any fieldwork; and a second discussing the broader implications. Alternatively, you may decide to combine Chapters 4 and 5 into one single chapter called something like Findings and Discussion, if you think this will improve the presentation of your results. This is more often done when writing up qualitative research findings. Whether you have one or two chapters is likely to depend upon the topic in question.
4.Tell me more about the discussion section…
This is a critical part of the whole study, and it is where any new discoveries will be made. You need to set this chapter out in a logical manner and the most appropriate way to do this is to systemically address the research objectives, questions and/or hypotheses that you set out in previous chapters.
You may have a purely qualitative study, in which case much of the discussion here will be based on your interpretations of the data that you have gathered (such as through interviews, focus groups, observation studies etc.) resulting from, for example, thematically analysing the data. Your work must go beyond mere description, to provide an analysis of information collected linking back to the literature, and to highlight the implications of your findings. It is perfectly acceptable to include direct quotes in this stage to highlight specific issues or get a particular point across.
In any event, you should not identify any individual by name or other identifying characteristic. Similarly, in most studies at this level the names of organisations should be omitted from your written work unless you have the express permission of the owner/custodian to use the name of the organisation. In writing a suitably analytical and interpretative piece of work, it is important that you refer continuously to your initial objectives and avoid being side- tracked on irrelevant detail or bogged- down by the superfluous minutiae which surround any topic. At the same time, you must also take care to ensure that the information collected is not simply ‘analysed’ for its own sake, without identifying the implications for the study: this is one distinction between a dissertation and project work.
In a quantitative study you will be presenting statistical data, and this must be analysed using appropriate methods, in most cases using specific statistical tests. Most quantitative data can be analysed using a variety of different tests, but you must choose a statistical test which is appropriate for the type of data, and which will answer your objectives or hypotheses. It is unethical to reanalyse data with a variety of statistical tests until you find a result or answer that you had hoped for.
Please note: All tables, charts etc. should be introduced and not stand alone without any relevant discussion by yourself. This is done by having an introductory discussion explaining what is shown in the table or chart that is coming up in the text. Immediately after the table or chart you then need to describe what it tells you. Do not leave this for the reader to work out. You must demonstrate that you understand what any table or chart displays.
At the end of this chapter, regardless of whether you have a qualitative or quantitative study (or both), you need to restate the main results and discuss them as they relate to what was known on this topic before you started your investigation. This means going back to the results and findings that you identified in the Literature Review chapter and discuss whether your results are in some way different, or whether your results simply confirm what was known about this topic before you started your Dissertation.
5.What do I include in my conclusions and recommendations?
This is the final piece of written work that will be read by the markers before they pick up their pens and marking sheets to allocate marks based on what you have written in your dissertation. Therefore, you should make this the best piece of work you have written in the entire programme.
This is a list of some of the issues that you should try to cover in the final chapter of your Dissertation. It is by no means exhaustive, and this is not an ‘official’ list in terms of marks, only a recommendation based on supervising and marking other Honours Dissertations. However, if you do cover most of these issues then you should be on the right path:
In theory anyone should be able to read your final chapter and still have a good idea about what your whole dissertation is all about.
Remember that the markers may read your first chapter and then go straight to your final chapter to make sure that you have been consistent in what you set out to discover. Therefore, it is important that your final chapter addresses everything you say you are going to look at (your objectives) in your first chapter.
The final chapter should be well structured. There are a lot of individual areas to cover so you need to be clear in setting this out. I suggest that you include a discussion on the following points.
o Re-state your overall Aim and Research Objectives. Let the reader re-acquaint themselves with what you have attempted to discover in your research and why the research is important. Briefly outline how you did this (i.e., your research approach and why you chose this approach).
o It is very important that you summarise your study findings clearly and concisely. It should be clear to the reader that your study findings (and recommendations which follow) are based on the evidence presented because of your research. Try to summarise your findings in a logical manner which will demonstrate that your dissertation research has addressed each of the research objectives.
o Then discuss the practical implications of your findings. This means identifying and writing out in detail the main recommendations you are making based on the research you have just conducted. This could be the largest section of your final chapter and so needs quite a bit of detail. It is important that you bring in your own interpretation of the findings, so try to argue your case strongly here and link to the research evidence (your research findings and/or the literature) to support your recommendations.
o Once you have stated your findings and conclusions you need to be honest in reflecting on the potential and apparent limitations of your study. (This is not a criticism of your work but an acknowledgement that every piece of academic research has some weaknesses associated with it). Here you should consider and discuss the validity and reliability of our own study findings. You should also acknowledge any limitations that you discovered when conducting the research (e.g., problems with sampling approach or response rate, lack of clarity over question wording or meaning etc.).
o You also need to discuss the generalisability of your findings. Who else could make use of your study findings? If it is many organisations, individuals, businesses etc. then this adds value to your findings. If you have used a case
study approach, then can your findings be transferable to other organisations? If so, then is this to a small number of very similar organisations, all organisations in the sector, all organisations in a particular country etc.? Remember, in qualitative studies, the focus tends to be on analytical generalisability to theory rather than to populations.
o Finally talk about recommended future research areas. There will be many things that you wanted to discover but were unable to because of lack of time or other resources. It may be that during your investigation you came across something new that would make a good study for someone else. What about any issues covered in the media, new Government legislation, advances in technology, world trade etc. that could impact on your findings? Does this mean that someone else should re-investigate this issue at some point in the future?
Finally, one of the best ways to see how your final chapter should be structured is to re- read some of the journal articles you read for the Literature Review chapter. The final two or three pages of any academic journal article will be as described above. If you can structure your final chapter in a similar way, and cover most of these points in a sensible and honest manner then it will be a very good read, a clear summary of the main points to do with your study, and the basis for a very good mark.