Complete the first draft of your dissertation proposal and take it to your DA class. I also hope you could use it as the proof of your learning outcomes and of our successful, interactive and accomplished class.

1. use the dissertation proposal proforma to write your week IA, if you have not yet started to use it. This is a must! I will not mark your week 6 IA if you do not use the proforma.
2. use my announcement to double check the front page and make sure the information we can give in this class is complete and correct; the third person is the only writing style you use for the proposal and the dissertation.
3. revisit week 1, 3 and 4 IAs, cut and paste the contents into one proposal proforma, revise and enrich them to complete week 6 IA. Use the notes in the Proforma and the Proforma with Notes document as the guidance. Remove the notes and the instructions when submitting your proposal.
4. I provide the following advice to facilitate you to complete your week 6 IA. I have done it before in different weeks but this time I put all of them together.

1. Aim, Objectives and feasibility of the dissertation
1.1 Research Background

This section needs to provide the background information of your research project from these two aspects.
1. Academic aspect – define the key terms and the key theories that your research uses. Argue the importance to study your research topic from the academic point of view with a brief summary of existing research findings about this research topic (some literature review but be brief, detailed literature review should be in section 2)
2. Practice aspect – this is to define the boundary of your research - which country? Which industry (industries)? Which organisation (s)? Which group(s) of people, etc., and why are they? What are current issues in terms of your research topic in the practice and why are they valuable to study?
note - you do not need to clearly separate these two points. I would like to see them to be integrated and synthesised to form a strong research background.
1.2 this depends on whether your research project is a qualitative one or a quantitative one

For a qualitative research project
1.2 Research Aim and Research Objectives or Questions
Based on the research background, create a feasible and comprehensive research aim that covers all the key points/topics that you want to study in your research project. Based on this research aim, create not more than three research objectives (statements) or research questions (question style statements). I do not suggest you create two sets of the research questions and the research objectives respectively. They could be either largely overlapped or could stretch your research topic to too many different directions. The research questions/objectives need to be generally big (but not too big). More detailed questions are to be asked in the interview or survey questions when you collect the data. I do not suggest you have more than 3 research questions. Too many research questions distract your research focus as well as increase the workload of data collection and analysis, which may become unmanageable when coming to data collection stage. Please note, all the research questions/objectives must be within the boundary of the research aim. There has to be a clear derivation from the research background to show the route of the research aim and the research questions.Any topic or key terms you address in the research aim and the research objectives/questions must have been briefly studied in the research background.

For a quantitative research project
1.2 Research Problem
At here, instead of having the research aim and the research questions, create a general research problem that covers the key factors(variables) that you want to investigate. Set up the hypotheses at the end of literature review as the outcomes of the literature review.
1.3 Feasibility

Please clearly indicate the targets of your data collection. Your relationship with these targets and the accessibility to them. At here, you must prove that you are able to collect the primary data from these targets, for example, the organisation(s) or people have accepted your data collection requests or you are in the process of contacting them and it is like to give their permission, etc.

2. Literature Review
Literature review is not a collection of the paper review of each paper you read. You need to compare and synthesise the references you have read and present them in a coherent manner against the research questions or help you to create the hypotheses.

You need to have at least 10 references, as required by the proposal proforma. The quality of the references is essential for you to maintain the quality of the literature review. You must have at least 5 academic journal papers in this section. You could use the 3 papers you have studied in week 3 IA. But, in this first draft of your proposal, if you could manage to use 5 and over references, it is good.

After the literature review is done, you must identify the gap between the existing publications and the practice. You must rationalise how your research may fill or reduce this gap. This is to show the value and the originality of your research.

As I said in the first section, if you decide to do a quantitative research, at here and based on the literature review, you should identify the key factors relevant to the research problem and their relationship with the research problem, and then set up a hypothesis for each factor.

3. Research Methodology and Methods
I suggest you write this section in such an order. Proper literature review must be conducted when you use a term or select a method or justify your ideas.

1. The epistemological stance – positivist paradigm or interpretivist paradigm? – please choose one of them. Define the two terms and rationalise the reason for your research to fall in one of them. When making this choice, please note, you need to review your research topic and ask yourself, what do you want to achieve from this research? Seeking answer to open and inductive research questions (interpretivist paradigm, qualitative research)? Testing relationship between different factors(variables) (positivist paradigm, quantitative research)? Both (not suggested to the Master's students)?
2. Research approach - If you choose to follow the intepretivist paradigm, you choose a qualitative approach and follow inductive logic. If you choose the positivist paradigm, you choose a quantitative approach and follow deductive logic. No matter which one you choose, you need to show you clearly understand the characteristics of this approach. You could choose a mixed paradigm and a mixed approach but you need to give sufficient rationale behind the reason of doing so; the constraints you have and you have the time and the resources to do it.
3. Research strategies, such as survey, experiment, case study, action research, etc. Survey and experiment are normally used in a quantitative inquiry. Action research, Grounded Theory, Ethnography, Interpretative phenomenological analysis (the IPA), etc are normally used in a qualitative inquiry. Case study could be used for both. In this section, clearly choose one or two (no more than two) strategies. You could also call them "research method", if you like.
4. Data collection - After the justification of step 2 and 3, you now explain your data collection methods. Please notes, the data collection methods you choose must be the ones that are required by the research strategies(methods) you choose in step 3.
5. Sample selection - After justifying step 4, do a sampling, you need to give some information, if possible, like this, Survey – what is the size of the sample population? Who are they? Does your research focus on the whole sample pool or just part of it and why? How many questionnaires do you plan to send out and/or receive? How do you approach these people? Collis' book, p.198-199, could help you to decide the survey sample size.
Semi-structured interview – how many and why? With whom and why are they?
You could choose to merge step 4 and 5, i.e., choose a research method and justify the sample selection for this method.
6. Data analysis - review the data analysis method(s) that are used in the research method(s) you choose, for example, the data analysis method specially used in the case study method. In other words, if you choose do to case studies, you need to use the data analysis method(s) that are required by the case studies method. Again, explain how you plan to use it.
7. validity, reliability and ethical issues - how do you ensure validity and reliability in the above steps? What may be the ethical issues you should consider? (you could use the ethics form to help you to answer this question). You need to review relevant academic literature, for example, validity and reliability issues specially related to the research method(s) and the data collection&analysis methods you choose, and discussion your plans to ensure them.

Complete the first draft of your dissertation proposal and take it...