Languages and Education Consultant

This is the season for some students to start thinking about their dissertations. Some Universities require a proposal for a dissertation to be developed during the next academic year, and students often struggle to fulfill this request while already feeling the heat of summer and the relaxing mood of the holidays to come.

A dissertation proposal is essentially a broad plan for the actual research you are going to be conducting later on. One of the big issues I face constantly when advising students at this stage is that most have never even studied statistics, and have little concern about what kind of methodology to use. It’s important to consider how you intend to analyze statistics of your dissertation, unless you opt for qualitative research. Personally, I always recommend quantitative studies, they will provide you with results that are more prone to generalization and as such will make your study more relevant and, as such, give you a better chance to have a good grade.

At the proposal stage you have to think about what is the main field you want to focus on, what is the problem that you mean to address. The best start is always to read: read good articles from renowned journals and those written by the most influential researchers in your field. When you feel that you have a broad understanding of the area you want to study, reflect on how that issue is important and relevant to study, and what you aim to contribute to research with your study.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Move on to posing specific questions or establishing the hypothesis that you aim to test. Be very specific and do your best to avoid over-complexity, keep your variables to a minimum, while keeping the research interesting and somewhat innovative. Remember that the variables must be well conceptualized, for example, if you decide to study bullying, make sure you are aware of which bullying definition you will adopt, because that will influence the questionnaires or other measures you decide to use in your study. Although not necessarily thinking about the method yet, have that in mind, as both aspects are much intertwined. If, for example, you choose hypothesis that will be impossible to test your study will have to be redesigned and you are wasting your time. So, decide on your hypothesis and then focus entirely in your method. An excellent way to do this is to read the results section in scientific papers, reflect on the methods other authors used and reflect on whether they would be suitable for your study. Also, consider the population, the size and characteristics of your sample. Particularly for those writing undergraduate dissertations, avoid difficult populations, either because they are scarce or difficult to reach, such as very specific ethnic groups; or challenging to work with, like detainees. A very safe option is always to work with students that you can reach within your school, and probably you’ll get a very reasonable number of them.

Deciding on research methods is very often hard, and another safe option is, whenever possible, to use methods that have already been validated. If your study is experimental, think about using the same or adjusted techniques from good research examples. You can, for example, use vignettes to present different conditions within your population, or use questionnaires. If you are studying depression, for example, there are at least dozens of depression scales already validated for the British population, but if your study is very innovative, or it focus on variables that have been understudied in literature, you can create your own questionnaire, but you have to be careful to address all the dimensions of the variables you considered in the design of the hypothesis appropriately, and use a scale that is clear. Likert scales are the most used, and can have several points of response, although often it is a five points scale. Some researchers opt for even numbers to avoid the tendency for people to answer in the middle, but the important thing is to have clearly distinguished points, avoiding ambiguous points such as “somewhat agree” and “disagree somewhat” which can be understood as actually meaning the same, the half point between agreeing and disagreeing!

And with that, you are almost ready to start the “actual” work! One more tip: to avoid rushing at the last minute, make yourself a calendar with specific tasks and timelines, and follow it!