Lecture 1 - Organising Your Research Project

This Lecture was definitely extremely useful, especially since I went into it feeling pretty unsure of how to structure a dissertation! To begin with, Richard suggested two books that could be very useful when trying together together research:

"Critical Thinking Skills" by Stella Cottrell
"Doing Your Research Project" by Judith Bell

Richard highlighted the main points of information about this dissertation, including how long it needs to be, how to structure it and when the deadline is. He did stress that we should have a SUBSTANTIAL DRAFT SUBMITTED BEFORE CHRISTMAS. 


In terms of planning:

• Write down all possible questions to investigate, and then focus on two sub-questions (Focus on Primary and secondary research)
• Pin down a working title
• The key terminology must be used in the working title!

This talk made everything seem less scary, for example Richard suggested we do simple things such as write down our question and stick ut on our wall where we will often to see it, that way the question will become engrained in our minds and means we would be less likely to go off on a tangent. 

Also, we discussed the importance of finding contradictory sources, and a good example of doing this would be to have a look at some online journals. We were also encouraged to think about qualitative and quantitive research, as well as making sure we consider ethics and getting approval from people, to avoid upsetting anybody! 

We were shown the layout that we should try and stick to in order to include the appropriate information:

Intro - approx 1000 words

Main Body - Context and themes

Main body - Case Studies of Practise 

Conclusion - Approx 1000 words

Seeing it approached in this way really made it clearer in my mind, instead if thinking about the amount of writing required, I was able to see the separate sections of the writing that will be required, and this made it all seem more manageable to me.