Research And Quantitative Methods

Template
Title
Provide a title that describes what you are going to research
Rationale and Research Questions:
Research is about questions – you need pose a question or a series of questions that investigate an academic problem worthy of research. To establish this you need to provide an academic and applied rationale for the research – a rationale is a justification of why this is a useful / interesting problem. Therefore, this section should:.
1.Outline the rationale for the research
2. Develop from the rationale at least 1 but no more than 3 research questions worthy of investigation.
Literature Review
In doing research you include yourself within a community of scholars, each of whom has gone into looking at similar problems, this is then written up by researchers and academics – you need to base your research on their work – almost as ‘proof’ that your research has value. To do this you need to provide a literature review of this past work to show how other researchers have developed their ideas. The literature review will ‘form the foundation on which your research is built’ (Saunders 2009:44). It will ‘evaluate’ past research, it will be ‘critical’. (Saunders 2009:48-49) and will be structured in such a way as to start wide and narrow down to your research problem – thereby linking the literature to the methodology. This section should:
1 Provide a literature review that shows relevance to your research idea
2 Highlights the main theoretical concepts
3 Covers a range of up-to-date sources that
4 Present an argument for the research
Please note: Citing just 3 sources from the Internet is not a literature review – you need to look in main texts and journals and these should include a range of sources.
Methodology / Methods / Sample
Your methodology should outline the theoretical and practical approach to gathering the data. You need to outline your overall approach and what philosophical stance you will
adopt (i.e. positivist or phenomenological) and then say why you have taken this approach in relation to your actual idea. You should also describe the method by which you are going to gather the data – any problems with this method – the channel of gathering the data and this should be explained in relation to research methods texts and you should then say why you are going to use this method in relation to your actual idea. You then need to outline the sampling strategy, who you are going to research, how have they been chosen (e.g. probability / non probability) and how many you intend to research and again this needs to by justified i.e. why in relation to the sample and the idea. The methodology should be broken down into:
1. An overall introduction outlining the philosophical approach
2. A section on the methods
3. A section on sampling
Please note: you need to justify each choice in relation to the actual idea and then back this up with reference to research method texts – common sense explanations are not acceptable and will mean you fail.
Referencing
You need to fully reference throughout the work – both in text and bibliographic references need to be in the Harvard APA style