1. Structure a WINNING Introduction Chapter 1 needs to be excellent. As in all beginnings, it needs to engage its audience – your examiners, supervisors, advisors and subsequent readers – and convince them of the value of your research. It has multiple other tasks: it must set the scene for your research, with sections on …
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A dissertation or thesis is somewhat like a chain – a chain of interlinked stages from identifying the problem to the conclusion. Of course, you can revisit and improve a previous stage. Nevertheless, a dissertation or thesis is only as strong as its weakest stage, like a chain that is only as strong as its …
One of the joys of teaching is listening to students’ responses when they’re asked a question. In the days of large in-student lectures, I would often direct a question to a sea of faces. Sometimes, an enthusiastic student would answer, beautifully, but completely off the topic. And my response? “That’s a great answer, but …
Whether you’re writing your proposal or the introduction to your dissertation or thesis, you will need to convince your supervisor or examiner that you’ve identified a researchable problem. The trouble is that not every problem is a research problem. Methodologists like Van de Ven (2007) provide guidance on how to distinguish between an ordinary problem and a research problem. …
You may wonder why my sympathy for Cronbach’s Alpha (also called Coefficient Alpha). Well, it’s because alpha is one of the most frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted statistics in theses, dissertations, proposals and other academic publications involving measurement 🥲. SO, WHAT IS CRONBACH’S ALPHA? Cronbach’s alpha is a measure of the internal consistency …
One aspect of research methodology that often confuses students is the topic of reliability. This is because there are really two main types of reliability: MEASUREMENT reliability and RESEARCH reliability. These two reliabilities are very different. Measurement reliability is all about assessing the reliability or consistency of the scores of your measurement instruments. These assessments …
The Purpose Statement is your time to shine. This is the time when you can tell your reader exactly what you’ve designed your research to do. Of course, the Purpose Statement must address the knowledge gap that you described in your Problem Statement. However, the Problem Statement is focused on the problem, and not directly on …
By the time you write the abstract of your thesis or dissertation, you will need to have completed your study, finalised your results, and appreciated the implications of your findings. And you’re probably exhausted. However, academic formatting styles provide valuable guidance on the content and format of the abstract. These should help you over the …
One of the most important aspects of the methodology section is to relate what you’re writing to your own research. Students frequently reproduce pages of textbook definitions of research concepts e.g., research approaches, sampling, reliability, validity etc., with virtually no reference to their own research. Let me show you an example of how many students (unfortunately) describe …
If you’re writing the methods section of your research, you will need to describe your sample. (I’m dealing here with the sample description, rather than the sampling method.) So, how should you describe your sample? According to APA guidelines, you should refer to people as ‘participants’, not as ‘subjects’. The term ‘subjects’ is used in …