How To Write A Dissertation at Undergraduate or Master's Level

[Music] you hello my name is dr. Derek Watson from the University of Sunderland and I've come to hit along here today to talk to you about dissertations or how to successfully complete a dissertation for your undergraduate or postgraduate degree so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be sharing with you some techniques on how to successfully complete your thesis first of all we'll start off with the title title of a thesis or your research area is instrumental in two is one you've got a posse degree a postgraduate degree and secondly you've got to create a gateway to employability so what I'm about to say today is possibly going to shock you or surprise you more students will pick a topic of interest to themselves and they pass but then when they start applying for a career a credible career they find that they struggle in the interview so what I'm suggesting is pick a topic that will appeal to organizations almost any type of organization so a key area that you might want to think about is potentially quality it affects all organizations or how do we motivate stuff with without paying them extra I how do you motivate staff through non-monetary mechanisms for trying to pick a topic whereby once you've completed your qualification you can actually use it and what I mean by using it is taking your thesis along to an interview and presenting that to the panel so they can see your theme your topic your contribution and also the professional structure of what you're capable of doing so bear that in mind so after the title abstract abstracts I would suggest that you leave it till the end it's the last section that you feed in thoughts at the beginning of the structure it's a bit like all the movies you will see clips of future movies to whet your appetite to come along to watch them at a later date your abstract has to be concise it's got to summarize your research contribution but it's got to be more revealing it's got to inspire the reader particularly your first marker your second marker and also your external examiner and it should be a paragraph approximately 150 words rather like the abstracts for journal papers next section introduction introduction has to be very concise why are you writing the thesis what is the purpose of your research and more importantly what is the aim and your objectives for researching that particular area and bear in mind a future employer mere wouldn't read your thesis hence the importance of your title after your introduction what you have is your literature your literature review now once again from experience and I've read many theses many dissertations students tend to because they've got such easy access to the internet and electronic journals and also through your university and internal intranet there's potentially too much information out there so what I say in many submissions that I haven't surprised is whereby students simply shotgun the information into the literature review and the literature review has to be concise you have to justify what are the key things in the literature so what I recommend students do is create diagrams throughout your thesis and once again this will help signpost your Assessors in the external examiner on what your thought process is so the literature review you'll create a diagram you will have your question in the middle and this will be bigger figure one and what you will do is from reading the journal papers your first journal paper what you'll do you'll add key things or not then when you come to read your second journal paper use a different pen and then if you come across additional subject areas you can add to them however hopefully you will be duplicating current things and as you build up this diagram make sure you put your reference your reference source so the reader the examiners can identify this is your diagram this is your question these are the key themes relevant and you've duplicated because you've been reading various journals and you've identified that these are the key things and the referenced so what you will then do in your literature review you will talk about these themes and how they are connected they're not in isolation how they are connected in a logical structure within that next section is your methodology your methodology and if you can imagine your methodology with sometimes students struggle with many students submit theses or dissertations with a weak methodology section and lose marks so it's critical that your methodology justifies the tools in which you're using so think about a plumber a plumber receives a call to go out to a property to fix a leaky pipe or a leaky radiator the plumber will attend with a box of tools they are your research tools the plumber then looks at the problem and decides which tools they are going to use and it's very similar to your research methodology you will have to justify your approach you will have to justify why you are selecting specific tools to answer your research question in addition to your methodology you need to think about how are we going to test this is what we've read about in the literature this is what the literature says but what is the commercial environment saying so what we need is gateways to try and color data so for example questionnaires interviews focus groups and this is one technique that you need to adopt which will enhance your overall grade having looked at your literature review which have identified key things you will then develop is set of questions and this is what students don't do more students don't do and the missing leg remarks what they need to do they need to develop it table and on the left-hand side you will write your questions questions 2 3 4 5 6 up to 15 20 questions now this can be open-ended or closed questions however these questions have to be linked to your literature review a many students simply pluck questions out of the air construct a questionnaire ship it off to an organization but when they come to submit the paper the thesis comments come back lack of linkage to the literature review how have you justified these questions so what I am proposing is you list the questions on the left-hand column on the right-hand column you justify why you selected that question but you also reference it to a reference source which is identifiable in your literature review there you have the linkage and so what many students don't do so let me just repeat that you justify the tools that you're going to use you then have them reflected on your literature review you extract questions those questions go into a table on the right hand side you justify a sentence or two sentences why have you selected those questions and you make a reference that you've specifically referenced from your literature review you have the linkage next section findings or data analysis or discussion or combination of all three but your title is relevant to employability you've got your introduction concise which is identified your introduction your aims your objectives your literature review it's being justified as in Figure 1 you've got the structure and you know you're talking about the key areas because you've superimposed different journal papers and you've identified the relevant areas from that you develop questions which is being identified in your methodology via the table now you're finding section you're finding section is very important because it will identify themes and what many students do is the distributed questionnaire they get the responses back from the organization and then their findings section is nothing better than a regurgitation of that data for example question 1 responses were and your students do a nice pie chart 70% the responses said this 30% the responses said X of the opposite and they systematically go through each question a cure for insomnia and also a mechanism not to demonstrate your analysis so this is where I suggest you look at the feedback from the question and what you've got is you've got various responses water suggests that you do you identify themes so for example theme one could consist of answers one three five and six theme two you've posted the responses in a 2 for 11 and 15 and so on and what this shows the Assessors is that you have the ability to look at raw data and clustered into key themes so what you'll do is you'll create a diagram or better still you'll have a diagram where you've got your table you've got the raw responses and then you have clustered them into key themes now when you come to write it up you've got specific sections or specific paragraphs addressing each of these themes gone through your findings section however what students also fail to do they will talk about the findings but they will not link it to the literature review so what you've got to do as you working through each of these sections systematically through your findings section you need to make reference to your literature review you're not repeating your literature review but what you're doing is for example thing one the data supports the commentary of and you link it back to a researcher which is referencing your literature review theme - maybe the did is very interesting this further supports or casts doubt or raises a question mark about what's being said in the literature you are demonstrating that you have the ability of analysis and application within that the next section your conclusion section bit like your core case where the judge summarizes what are the general findings of the research what did you find and what are those implications for an organization or particular market or service sector a key area which is also neglected is the recommendation section quite often I will look at thesis as an external and I will say at best a paragraph now really to us an extent as academics we know the literature we know the different types of methodology we don't know how you can structure the theme it so if you can do that you're going to get extra marks yes you can demonstrate your ability to summarize in a conclusion which should be approximately half a page but then comes the recommendations and this is the key part of your contribution it's your thumbprint it's what you can contribute to the to the bedrock of knowledge or your community of practice within that so recommendations recommendations and what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a technique to make sure you can't just submit a paragraph so going back to the diagram of themes so this could be if we've got figure 1 there this would be to get to what you would create in here in your recommendations is a diagram and what you do you would have the 1 2 3 theme for the issues that you've identified in your findings that are linked to your recommendations your recommendations are well so what you've identified the problems how are you gonna what are you going to recommend what are your commercial viable recommendations that you can present to the organization or to the market sector so this is what I suggest students do you create another diagram you cut your themes there you create an organizational structure with ST or s stands for strategic T stands for tactical or stands for operational so what I'm doing is I'm creating the diagram where you've identified the things we've got the organizational structure strategic senior management tactical middle management operational frontline stuff on the the frontline of the organization so what we have to do theme 1 what are our recommendations what are we going to recommend at a strategic level to resolve this problem what are we going to resolve or recommend at attacked achill and at an operational now the reason i'm structuring it like that is any recommendation has to be brought in by the organization you've got to get the support from senior management strategic you've got to get support from middle management the tactical and you've got to get support from the frontline troops interrupting on the frontline what are you good and recommend their theme to what are you going to recommend it a strategic tactical operational thing 3 what you're going to recommend it the strategic tactical operational and last theme strategic tactical operational now your recommendations need to start off by stating you will be structuring your recommendations on the three distinct headings strategic tactical operational and justify why you're doing that you need to do that to get the full commitment of the organization to buy into your solutions if you just go for senior management what about middle management and the operatives frontline staff everyone needs to be on the same page with the solutions so what you'll then do is systematically you'll have a paragraph or two paragraphs on strategic challenges recommendations tactical recommendations and operational recommendations within that now what I do recommend that you do is in addition which isn't always asked for is what we call an action sheet meaning you've done your literature review you've justified your methodology with your questions link to your literature review you've gone through your findings section you've clustered the key themes together you've summarized it you've come up with commercially viable syllable recommendations and this is what a future employee will look at this is what the homing on has this student of potential candidates got the ability not just to identify problems but the structure solutions but you're going to go the extra nine yards what you're going to do is you're going to produce an action sheet one-page electronic and what it has is it's got the issue and these are the issues that need to be addressed you've also got person responsible you got to give someone the responsibility you've got the resources required you've got the cost and you've also got the time frame so many thesis is dissertations include recommendations or vorbei I've said smaller eggs short very short recommendations this avoids it you've got three distinct sections within your recommendations so your recommendations should be running approximately two possibly three pages in length and then what you will do you will have your themes one two three four there might be more than four themes there might be five six I wouldn't go above more than six because of lead to bulky person responsible so who do we choose you're not going to lose marks by identifying somebody in the organization whereby the ultimate organization might say well that's not specifically for that person what the examiners in the Assessors want to know is have you identified say someone in the for example the HR manager and with regards there if we run a keep the theme on the HR manager the resource might be training one of your recommendations must probably be training or repeat training it will be well if everyone needs to be trained what how much is that going to cost once again you're not going to lose marks if you don't get the exact cost right what the examiners want to see is have you thought about the cost so for example a member of staff might work out 100 pounds to trend if you've got a cohort of 15 so what you would do is you would guesstimate the likely cost this section here time frame would be short term medium term long term and what I mean by long term 12 months this action sheet involves a 12 month scenario so short term could be one to three months medium term could be three to six months long term could be six months to twelve months but make sure that you include that and when that's completed you can go back you see right that's my action sheet that's the sheet appear back you're going on Monday morning and give the organization those things are linked to these recommendations which are linked to these themes which were extracted or clustered in your final section from your methodology which you have justified in the table your literature review is being justified because it's systematic and you duplicated you know these are the common themes from the journal papers which you've read and you've documented there you can put in your abstract now you can summarize what was your area of research what was important about it what did you contribute within that in your abstract so don't forget your literature review links team methodology yeah findings section links back to your literature review because when you're talking about the themes you make in reference you're not rewriting your literature review you're making reference to your literature review they're just in reference only your conclusion links to your findings your recommendations link to your findings and your recommendations are developed into an action sheet within that and there you have a structured dissertation that links that demonstrates your analysis your synthesis your application of viable commercial recommendations and the extra bit is your action sheet one page 12 months advise what you would recommend to the organization to help eradicate these problems and if you do that you should pursue dissertation and I should give you a good crack at getting your first job interview thank you very much

Channel: Mark Proctor

Views: 220,684

Rating: 4.9416614 out of 5

Keywords: Dissertation, Undergraduate, Master's Level, Research Dissertation, Research

Id: 1O_Go1KzAyE

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2018