Your Undergraduate Dissertation

The Essential Guide for Success

Nicholas Walliman

За особеностите на екземпляра

Състояние:: Много добро
Забележка:: Използвана книга, чисто от употреба книжно тяло, отчислен библиотечен екземпляр, леко захабен външен вид.
Език:: Английски
Наличност:: 1 бр.

За изданието

Издателство:: Sage Publications
Град на издаване:: London
Година:: 2004 г.
Език:: Английски
Страници:: 275
Корици:: Меки
Категория:: Образование
Тегло (гр.):: 508
Ширина (мм):: 170
Височина (мм):: 240
Дебелина (мм):: 18
ISBN:: 9780761941408

Your undergraduate Dissertation: The Essential Guide for Success practical step-by-step guide to managing and developing a successful undergraduate project. Nicholas Walliman offers a comprehensive guide to both the theoretical and practical aspects of doing a dissertation. This book provides a clear and structured explanation of how to undertake a project, helping readers to identify and acquire the necessary skills to plan and carry out the research and writing. This practical book provides: Advice for preparing a project and choosing a topic > Guidelines for writing a project proposal and producing a literature review > Advice on choosing and implementing appropriate methodology > An introduction to the philosophy of research and ethical issue > Methods of data collection and analysis > Information for writing-up the report > Interdisciplinary real-life' examples to illustrate key themes This book is a compact, easy-to-read guide to all the essentials of dissertation writing at undergraduate level. Written in a lively and engaging manner, its use of humorous illustrations, what to do' guidance and useful references to further reading, make it an attractive handbook for students across the social sciences. Written by an experienced lecturer and writer, this book is a 'must-have' for any student to maximize their success in dissertation writing. Nicholas Walliman is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Postgraduate Research School of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. He is also an Associate Lecturer for the Open University. Previous work includes the successful student reference text for the postgraduate community, Your Research Project. * Introduction Oh no, not another book to read! After all, I’ve got a dissertation to write! I understand your concern, hut I intend this to be not just another book. In fact, if you read this book, writing your dissertation should be quicker, easier and more likely to get a good grade. The main consideration is that you will be doing a research-based written exercise of this scale for the first time. This means that there is a lot to learn and not much time to learn it. Wfiat’s more, you have little room for making errors or miscalculations; you cannot postpone the deadline. You will need to learn about how to set up a dissertation project successfully, find out what will get you good marks, organize and do all the work, and hopefully make the process as enjoyable as possible. That is where this book will be of invaluable use to you. In fact, it could help you avoiding having to read lots of other books to glean all this necessary information from here and there; textbooks on research methods are generally a heavy read! I have kept the chapters short (that is why there are so many of them) in order to focus on answering one particular question at a time. You should then easily be able to pick out whichever question interests you at the moment. It is, therefore, not necessary to read through from the beginning to the end. However, I have tried to put the questions into the same general sequence as they appear when you progress through the project, so you should find navigating the process easy enough. This also results in some elaboration later on in the book of topics that were raised earlier, consistent with your growing understanding of the issues. Some books provide lots of exercises to do in order to practise what you have read pnd to test yourself on w hether you have understood the main points made. I have generally avoided these, as I believe that exercises are rarely completed and often seem remote from your subject, which is the reason for reading the book in the first place. It is difficult to find illustrative examples that will resonate with everyone. Instead, I urge you to constantly reflect on what you are reading, how this influences your thoughts in relation to your own dissertation topic, what you will do and how you will do it. In this way, you will be able to decide what is relevant to your own work and where you will need to follow up the issues in more detail in other literature. In order to prompt you to make some decisions at the end of each chapter, I have added a section on ‘what to do next’. Again, what you do will be directly linked to your own topic, so you will not waste any time doing generalized academic exercises. I have also provided short lists of books where you can find more on the topics discussed if you need to. A list of references cited is given at the end of the book. Use this book as a guide, just as you would a travel guide. Extract what you find useful (which I hope is most of it) and leave aside the parts that are not relevant. Once you have decided on your topic and the methods that you will use to explore the research problems or answer the research questions, you will he able to judge just what information you need to complete the work. Don’t expect this book to provide you with all the answers. I have written it in order to give a basic introduction to the main factors in writing an undergraduate dissertation - in almost any subject.' 1 his is where the ruh is. Because of the diversity of topics and different approaches, you will almost certainly have to get further information on specific research methods selected for your own project. The chapters that are essential reading for all subjects are Chapters 1-12 and 17-20. Chapters 13-16 need to be read selectively, depending on the type of research that you will be doing. There is no point in me listing subjects and what you should read in each case. 'The main distinctions are whether you are investigating ideas, people or things, and what combination of these. You will probably have to skim through Chapters 13-16 in order to decide what is most relevant, though I have given some indications at the beginning of these chapters. What this book will also help you to do is to decide just what further information you require. Of course, background and specific information about your subject will need to be gathered independently by you, irrespective of which research approach you take. I hope that you find doing your dissertation is not just hard work, but also a useful experience, where you learn a lot about a subject in which you are interested and end up getting the good marks you deserve. Nicholas Walliman ** Summary of Contents Introduction 1 What’s It All For? 2 What Types of Dissertations Are There? 3 What Will It Be About? 4 How Do I Get Started? 5 What’s All This About Philosophy? 6 How Do I Write a Proposal? 7 What About Working and Planning My l ime? 8 Where Do I Get Hold of all the Necessary Background Information? 9 How Can I Manage All the Notes? 10 Why Do I Need Arguments? 11 What Sorts of Data Will I Find? 12 What’s All This About Ethics? 13 How Do I Get Hold of Data? Reading, Surveying, Testing and Observing 14 What Do I Do with the Information? Using Quantitative Analysis 15 When Do I Combine Data Collection with Analysis? Doing Qualitative Research 16 How Can I Create a Mini World to Manipulate? Experiments and Models 202 17 What About Referencing? 217 18 How Can I Manage Such a Long Piece of Writing? Writing Up 226 19 I low Can I Make My Work Look Interesting and Easy to Read? 240 20 Who Else Might Be Interested in My Writing? 259 References 269 Index 271

Ключови думи: книги на английски език, висше образование, бакалавърска дисертация, писане на дипломна работа