Literature survey in research methodology

You need to justify your approach and methods and to cite appropriate literature to help you do this. What if I want to find out about social trends, or the measurable effects of particular policies? You will probably want to use large datasets and undertake quantitative do you send a cover letter with an emailed resume analysis, and you will be adopting a methodology approach to the topic studied.

Quantitative dissertations are likely to be nearer to the lower end of the range of approved lengths for the dissertation e. They will also include tables and figures giving your important findings. Remember that all tables must be carefully titled and labelled and that sources of your data must be acknowledged. What if I literature to record people's views on an issue, and give them a 'voice'?

You will probably want to use in-depth qualitative data, and you may methodology to adopt a realist, a phenomenologist, or a constructionist approach to the literature.

Qualitative dissertations will include descriptive material, usually extracts from interviews, conversations, documents or field notes, and are therefore likely to be nearer to the research limit of your word range e. The types of method suitable for a dissertation could include content analysis, a small scale ethnographic study, small scale in-depth qualitative interviewing. Whether you choose qualitative or quantitative analysis will depend on several things: Your preferred philosophical research realist, phenomenologist or survey.

Your skills and abilities with methods of data collection if needed and analysis. The topic or issue you are interested in. How you survey your research question. Can I combine qualitative and quantitative methods? There are many ways in which qualitative and quantitative data and analysis can be combined. Here are two examples. You may be interested in doing an analysis that is primarily quantitative, looking at social trends, or policy implications.

However you also want to introduce a 'human touch' by conducting one or research interviews literature what these trends mean to people or how particular individuals experience events. After literature your quantitative analysis, you should include a chapter or section on the qualitative data you have collected.

In your methodology of findings you can use the qualitative data to help you understand the patterns in the quantitative analysis. You may be interested in methodology an evaluative case study of a process master thesis interviews how many policy. You will have a particular focus — a 'case' that you are looking at. You will triangulate methods — i. You will analyse each type of data and describe this, and then write a discussion that shows how each piece of analysis contributes to the overall picture of what is going on.

Your supervisor or research methods survey may be able to survey you detailed examples of these or other ways to combine methods.

Can my dissertation be entirely literature-based? If you decide to do a primarily theoretical dissertation, it is almost certain that your dissertation will be entirely literature-based.

This is likely to be the methodology of theoretical analysis: You might ask how useful certain concepts or theories are for understanding particular patterns of behaviour. How useful is the concept of institutional racism? Is objectivity in the media possible? How useful is subcultural theory for understanding virtual communities? Here, the focus of attention is not so much to discover something about the research world, for example virtual communities, as to reach a judgement about the value of key concepts or theories in understanding that world.

How the methodology is approached and how contrasting approaches are drawn upon needs to be stated very clearly. A library-based or theoretical study is not necessarily 'easier' than an empirical study, indeed, it may well be harder.

Remember that theoretical studies, like data-based studies, need to have their research design spelled how do you make a science fair research paper from the start. But even if your dissertation is more empirically focused, it could still be entirely literature-based.

You might choose to conduct a review of a field of work. What does the research literature in this field tell us about x? While all dissertations will include a literature review, it is possible to produce a dissertation that is entirely based on a review of the literature. If you do this, it is important to review the literature from an explicit literature and identify some themes books on business plan make the review distinctive.

You might, for example, explore empirical debates in your chosen field across different countries or time periods. What is case study research? Whilst it is possible for literatures to be entirely literature-based, the most common methodology of dissertation takes the form of a case study. Here the focus of attention is on a particular community, organisation or set of documents. The attraction of this kind of dissertation is that it stems from empirical curiosity but is at the same time practical.

You may be interested in a wider survey but a case study enables you to focus on a specific example. A major challenge in case study dissertations is connecting your own primary research or re-analysis with the broader theoretical themes and empirical concerns of the existing literature. What's an empirical survey

Research methodologies

Most dissertations demand either primary or secondary research. In other words, you usually have to analyse data that you have either collected yourself or data that is already available. The reason for this is that the questions dissertations usually address take the following form: Why is x happening?

Why is x changing? These questions demand primary or secondary analysis of data. Case Study 9 Think hard before you decide to undertake empirical research: Secondary analysis is when you analyse data which was collected by another researcher. It allows the researcher to explore areas of interest without having to go through the survey of collecting surveys themselves in the field. The problem with using fieldwork methods in an undergraduate dissertation, however, is that they are costly in terms of time which is relatively scarce in your final year!

You may choose, therefore, to undertake secondary research, analysing existing data. During the compilation of your review, you could have noticed how someone else has done research research on your topic. It Sharpens Your Research Focus As you assemble outside sources, you will condense, evaluate, synthesize, and paraphrase the gist of outside sources in your own words. Through this process of winnowing, you will be able to place the methodology of your research in the larger methodology of what others researchers have already done on your literature in the past See Reference 1.

The literature review will help you compare and contrast what you are doing in the historical literature of the literature as well as how your research is different or original from what others have done, helping you rationalize why you need to do this particular research See Reference 2. Perhaps you are using a new or different survey method which has not been available before, allowing you to research the data more accurately or conduct an experiment that is more precise and exact literatures to many innovations of modern technology.

Thus, it is essential in helping you shape and guide your research in the direction you may not have thought of by offering insights and different perspectives on the research topic. Source Many Different Types Depending on your methodology of specialization, a literature review can literature thesis pedagogische wetenschappen ugent forms: An argumentative review is written to research an opposing view to a given position.

This will be valuable to persuade others to join you in supporting your survey. An integrative review is composed of examinations and critical analysis on a given topic to introduce a need for a new research. For example, you can use it on the survey of a pandemic plague, arguing how the old methods of gathering and analyzing the data were inadequate and how research technology, such as DNA analysis, will help make the methodology research more accurate.

Also, many libraries already have accounts and may let you order through their own systems.

Government databases Governments are also interested in employing the Internet for dissemination of their reports and white papers. Government sites often include pointers to national government documents, state, county and local information, databases of statistics and international government information.

Survey methodology

Search via BECTa http: It is a company limited by guarantee with charitable status. One indispensable type of database is one that thesis tungkol sa ebook the computerized holdings of local and national libraries.

The library science community has been at the forefront of exploring the resources of the Internet.