Dissertation Planning, Preparation and Delivery

Unit One
Selecting Your Dissertation Question
Aim of the Unit
This Unit aims to help you identify your dissertation question. By the end of this Unit you should have a question that will form the basis of your Scoping Review and you should know how to use this to form your final question.
Introduction
You dissertation question is likely to evolve through a number of steps. You will probably bring with a general area of interest which will enable you to select a topic that will form the basis of your initial question. Your initial question will allow you to make an initial search of the available literature so that you know what the key issues and problems are in that area. It is that which will help shape your final dissertation question.
Now you are aware of that process you can begin by thinking about what areas you are interested in studying.
Unit One – Activity One – Reviewing Your Course
Thinking back over your course so far what topics and issues have interested you the most?
What areas of the programme would you like to find out more about?
Which areas do you feel most knowledgeable about?
Unit One – Activity Two – Thinking about the future
What skills and knowledge from the course do you hope to be using 5 years from now?
Imagine it is 10 years from now, you have graduated, and had a couple of jobs, but now you are doing your ideal job. Describe what it is about the job you love.
Developing Your Initial Question
Choosing Your Topic Area
Your first step is to develop your initial dissertation question. This is the question you will use to guide your preliminary studies, the studies that will lead up to your final dissertation question which will form the basis for your methodical research literature search.
The first step to developing your initial dissertation is to pick your topic area. The topic area is the area of study which you are most interested in, and can be summed up in one word, or a very short phrase: abuse, the built environment, children, drugs, education, faith, etc. As you can see these areas are vague, and huge, but they provide an important anchor to stop you going ‘off-topic’ as you research and write your dissertation.
Unit One – Activity Three – Possible Topics
Review your answers to Activities One and Two. Based on those answers, what kinds of areas are you most interested in for your topic area?
Having selected some topics now begin to narrow that down to the one you want to explore in your dissertation. One way to do that is to think in terms of the value to you of each topic area. Areas you are familiar with will be easier than ones you aren’t familiar with. Areas that interest and fascinate you are more likely to keep your interest that ones that you find less interesting. Areas linked to your future career plans are more likely to be useful for you than ones that are not. Finally, areas that have been fairly well studied are likely to be easier to find research on than areas that have not been well studied, where research is less readily available to you.
Having considered that now look at the following table below. For each possible topic area rate it on a scale of Yes, Somewhat or No.
Unit One – Activity Four – Choosing A Topic
Topic Are you familiar with the topic? Does the topic fascinate you? Is the topic linked to your career plan? Has the topic area been well researched?

Using this table you should be able to pick a main topic area that appeals to you and will be useful for you in the longer term.

The next step is to look at your area of interest.
Developing an Area of Interest
As has been stated already, topic areas are vague and large. Your next step is therefore to pick an area of interest within your topic area.
Unit One – Activity Five – Choosing an area of interest
Thinking about the topic you have chosen, what is it about that topic that interests you? What makes it worth studying further?
One of the key processes in preparing your Initial Question is to understand that it needs to lead to a question that is broad enough to have sufficient research related to it, yet narrow enough to ensure you are not over-loaded with research. This means that sometimes you need to narrow down in two, three, four or more steps. This can be represented as a funnel, like this.

Figure 1 – Narrowing the topic down
For example, you might decide that your topic area is mental health, you then decide within that you want to look at post-natal depression and a sub-topic. This is because you are particularly interested in women’s experiences of post-natal depression as your main area of interest, with a specific area of interest in the impact of parental support groups on the experiences of women diagnosed with post-natal depression.
It is essential to understand that the general flow, from a general topic to narrow area of interest is vital in framing a good question, but what you call those intermediate steps, and how many of them there are, is unimportant.
Unit One – Activity Six – Making it specific
Having considered what makes your topic interesting, and using the funnel, choose a specific area of interest.
Your Initial Question
The final step is to turn this specific area of interest into a question.
Questions will focus primarily on one of two things. Questions will either focus on expanding the knowledge and understanding of specific area of interest, or they will focus on proposing some change in practice in relation to the specific area of interest.
In general questions about expanding knowledge and understanding will begin with ‘What’: What is the impact of parent support groups on the well-being of women diagnosed with post-natal depression?
In general question about developing practice will begin with ‘How’: how can parental support groups best improve the well-being of women diagnosed with post-natal depression?
It is important not to have a question that can be answered with a yes or a no, for example ‘Do parent support groups help people with post-natal depression?’
It is also important to avoid question that contain unproven assumptions. For example it would be fine to use a question like ‘What are the barriers to women from the black and ethnic minorities who have been diagnosed with post-natal depression joining parent support groups’ as there is no real assumption here, especially when you consider that ‘there aren’t any’ is a potentially valid finding. On the other hand a question like ‘Why don’t women from black and ethnic minority communities join parents support groups’ would be less acceptable as you first of all have to prove that they don’t, and then explain why.
Unit One – Activity Seven – Your Initial Question
Having considered it carefully, what is your initial question?
Your initial question forms the basis of your initial scoping review, which is the subject of the next Unit.
It is important to remember that the initial question is likely to be refined in the process of researching and writing up your dissertation.

Unit Two
Carrying Out Your Scoping Review
Aim of the Unit
This Unit aims to help you identify the key literature necessary to write the first draft of your introduction. By the Unit of this Unit you should be able to identify the key texts, writers, laws, policies and significant events in relation to your dissertation topic.
Introduction
Before you start on your main research for your dissertation you need to scope the topic. Scoping means carrying out a relatively quick and fairly broad review of the information that is relevant to your research question. You will use this to refine your question.
Starting where you are
As a third year undergraduate student you already have a considerable amount of knowledge about your course subject area.
Unit Two – Activity One – Building on Your Background Knowledge
Using either free text or a Mindmap, summarise the main things you know about your question and the related area.
Policy and Law
It is vital that you locate your dissertation within the framework of policy and law. These guide practice and set limits on what must happen, what must not happen, and what can happen. You should already have some familiarity with the relevant laws and policies, but there may be other laws and policies that are relevant.
Unit Two – Activity Two – Setting the Legal and Policy Context
When you think of your initial question, which laws and policies do you think will be relevant?
As you research your question add key relevant laws and polices here.
Key Writers, Key Texts
For any subject there are likely to be key writers you should be familiar with. If you are writing about anti-oppressive practice you should be familiar with writers such as Lena Dominelli and Neil Thompson. If you are talking about Attachment Theory you should be familiar John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and Pat Crittenen; if you are writing about Black Feminism then you should be familiar writers such as Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. If you are writing about child development then you should be familiar with writers such as Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and Erik Erikson.
You also need to think about the key texts by these authors. This is where it is sensible to use the ‘work smarter, not harder’ approach. As a final year undergraduate student you are expected to work hard and demonstrate a very sound knowledge of your subject area. This means reading some of the original texts. If your dissertation focuses on engaging with communities then it is reasonable to expect you to have read things such as the original 1969 paper on citizen participation. However it is hard to know which original papers are worth reading, and which are not. This is where it helps to use a short cut. Instead of trying to plough through as much of the original writing as you can in the hope of hitting something relevant, look in the more recent books and see which names and which texts crop up repeatedly. If the same name, the same book, the same article is being reference repeatedly by different current writers, then it is worth trying to get hold of things by that author, or a copy of that book or journal article.
Unit Two – Activity Three – Key Writers, Key Texts
Which writers and which texts do you know of that will be useful?
How can you go about finding out what else you need to read?
Conceptual Understanding
One thing that can surprise students when it comes to their dissertation is that there are few, if any, marks for ‘knowing stuff’. Factual knowledge, being able to name things for example, carries practically no weight on the final dissertation grade. It is possible to know a hundred facts related to your question, and to put them in your dissertation, and still fail. What is required is conceptual understanding.
Conceptual understanding means to be able to organise the facts into a way that both makes sense and which helps answer your question. If for example you wanted to write about the use of behavioural techniques you would need to understand the concept of reinforcement, and to be able to demonstrate it to the point where you could clearly and effectively explain the difference between the concept of negative reinforcement and punishment.
It is vital to remember that most of the concepts you encounter on this course are ‘fuzzy concepts’; that is concepts with multiple meanings, such that no two writers seem to mean exactly the same thing when they use it. For example some people use ‘racism’ to mean ‘racial prejudice’, in other words something can only be described as racist when it is routed in a set of negative beliefs about another group on the basis of their skin colour. This also means that the term can be used to all ethnic groups, not just those who are social dominant, in other words anyone can be racist, regardless of their skin colour. For others however the concept of racism is embedded in wider social inequality. An action can be deemed racist when it further disempowers an already disempowered ethnic group, regardless of whether any prejudice was involved. For those using this definition only members of dominant ‘racial’ groups can be racist, as the concept is based on existing social inequality. Note that this does not mean that ‘only white people are racist’, as both the Japanese treatment of the Chinese and the Ugandan treatment of South Asians would both count as racism in this definition. The important point in your dissertation is for you to demonstrate that you know what the key concepts are in relation to your question and that you understand both how you are using those concepts and some of the ways other people use them.
Concepts themselves build up into theories. A theory will explain how different concepts fit together in order to do various things, such as more fully describe the way things are, explain why things are the way they are, predict what is likely to happen in a given circumstance, and be useful as a guide to doing things better.
Unit Two – Activity Four – Key Concepts and Theories
What are the key concepts that relate to your dissertation question?
What are the key theories that relate to your dissertation question?
The Source-o-meter
In your initial scoping review you can draw on anything that will help you build your answering of the facts, concepts, theories, laws, policies and practices that relate to your dissertation question. The range of things that can help is vast, from books and journal articles, to TED talks and YouTube videos; from Acts of Parliament and government policies, to movies and song lyrics. If you wish to understand the impact of civil war on family life you can look at the research that has taken place into that topic, and you can also read a novel like “Half a Yellow Sun.” Both of these will inform your writing. It is however important to realise that not all sources are equally credible. To help with this I have created what I call a Source-o-Meter to help you evaluate your sources.
Level 1 – Common knowledge and general websites Level 2 – Popular Culture and mainstream media Level 3 – Websites from reputable organisations Level 4 – Non-peer reviewed journal articles and text books Level 5 – Peer reviewed journal articles

These are best avoided, unless you use them to show our unreliable the information for the general public is. These are sometimes useful for setting your question in context, but should never be used to prove a fact These are useful for setting the context and for supporting evidence for your conclusions These are good and will help develop your introduction and will support your conclusions These are the strongest and should form the main basis for your conclusions
Figure 2 – Source-o-Meter
Recording Your Sources
Your scoping review is your initial review of the readily available literature. It will provide you with information to do the following.
• Refine your dissertation question
• Develop your understanding of the facts, concepts and theories related to your question
• Give you enough information to write your conclusion
• Give your ideas to analyse the findings from your literature search.
It is important to keep a record of the sources you find when you carry out your scoping review as this will save considerable time when it comes to writing up your dissertation.
Unit Two – Activity Five – Recording Your Sources for the Scoping Review
Authors’ Name Title Year Level on Source-o-Meter What was most helpful from this source?

Authors’ Name Title Year Level on Source-o-Meter What was most helpful from this source?

Authors’ Name Title Year Level on Source-o-Meter What was most helpful from this source?

Refining your Dissertation Question
If you have completed your scoping review well you will have a very detailed knowledge of the subject area, in particular what the main issues and problems are within that subject area. You should now be able to use this to refine your dissertation question to one that you can use for your literature search. This question needs to be specific enough to be answerable and general enough that there is sufficient available research to answer the question.
You can still work on further refining the question as you carry out the rest of the work on your dissertation, but for now you should be able to clearly state your question.
Unit Two – Activity Six – Stating Your Research Question
What is your dissertation question?

Unit Three
Carrying Out Your Literature Search
Aim of the Unit
This Unit aims to help you carry out a methodical and repeatable literature review using NELSON. By the end of this Unit you should be able to collect a credible range of research papers that will help you answer your dissertation question.
Introduction
The first thing to understand about doing your literature search is that it is very, very different from doing your scoping review. In a scoping review you simply trawl through the readily available data to get a solid grounding in the subject area. In your literature search you are going to carry out a piece of research.
You are strongly advised to dedicate about 20% of your entire time allocation for the dissertation to your literature search. Cutting corners in this part of the process will only increase you workload in other sections.
Unit Three – Activity One – What is research?
How do you define research?
What will make your dissertation a piece of research?
If you cannot confidently answer the two questions above you must seek help from the module lead or from your dissertation supervisor, as these two questions are essential to managing your literature search.
Basics of a Search Strategy
Your search strategy will begin with your search terms. These are the words and phrases that you will put into NELSON to look for appropriate research to use in your analysis. As well as the basic search terms you will also need to decide how to most effectively get the research you are looking for. This will include using phrases, not just single words, and also Boolean terms, such as AND and NOT. For the Boolean terms you will then need to plan your inclusion and exclusion criteria, these are the grounds you will use for deciding to include a piece of research or exclude a piece of research from your search. These criteria will be expanded to help you filter your results to find the research you will need to analyse. Finally there will be a process for analysing your results in a way that lets you answer your dissertation question.
These steps will be considered in detail.
Developing Search Terms
You need to begin your search by deciding what terms you will use in your search.
Unit Three – Activity Two – Search terms
Look at your dissertation question from Unit Two- Activity Six
Think about the words you can use to search for research related to your question and write them here.
You will almost certainly find it helpful to try out these terms to see which ones yield the most helpful results. This will help you test your search strategy as you go along.
Unit Three – Activity Three – Final search terms
Having tested your search terms, which ones will you include in your final search?
Your testing should also give you a sense of what is useful and what is not. If you are looking into mental health and green spaces then you will want to put brackets around each of those terms, so the search engine only gives you the exact phrase, and also use the word AND between the phrases so that it only yields results which contain both phrases.
Unit Three – Activity Four – Refining the search (Part 1)
Using the words AND, OR, and NOT refine your search term
When you have done this record the number of hits you still need to search
It is highly likely at this point that you will still have too many hits to be easily searchable so you need to consider how to narrow down your field of research papers. There are many ways you can do this, many of which will form inclusion and exclusion criteria.
You are strongly urged to use Peer Reviewed Journals only. In addition you can limit the dates of publication to the past 10 years or even the past 5 years. This should bring your field of potential papers down to a more manageable number.
Unit Three – Activity Five – Refining the search (Part 2)
Make a note of the ways in which you identify the research to be used in your in the next step of the search.
When you have done this record the number of hits you still need to search
Filtering Your Results
Having got this far you are able to move on to the final stage of the literature search, the use of inclusion and exclusion criteria. This should be guided by the details of your dissertation question. For example if you are looking at the effectiveness of early years provision on educational performance in the UK who will want to include any study that uses a UK population group and exclude any study not based in the UK. If you want to find out about people’s experiences you will probably want to include qualitative studies and exclude quantitative studies.
In general the way you will check these features is by looking at the ‘details’ tab on NELSON, and if that does not give you the answer you can then switch to looking at the abstract, the introduction and the conclusion of each article you find. You may need to practice first to develop your inclusion and exclusion criteria, but there are two really important points. Firstly, the criteria you use should be clear, in that someone else using your criteria should get the same results, and it should be logical, that is there should be a sound reason for including or excluding any specific piece of search.
IMPORTANT NOTE
It is important to use every piece of research you find using your strategy. In some cases you might only find four or five key pieces of research. In other cases you might find forty or more. As long as your strategy is clear, detailed and reasonable then four or five will be fine. If it is not then you may need to refine your search strategy. Equally, if you can manage to analyse 40 articles that is also fine, but if that it too much then you might need to refine your question or tighten up you inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Unit Three – Activity Six – Filtering your results with inclusion and exclusion criteria
List your inclusion criteria
List your exclusion criteria
When you have done this record the pieces of research you will be analysing
Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4
Article 5
Article 6
Article 7
Article 8
Article 9
Article 10
Article 11
Article 12
Article 13
Article 14
Article 15
Article 16
Article 17
Article 18
Article 19
Article 20
This table can be extended if you are using more than twenty articles.
Evaluating your search
You should have now created a rigorous and detailed search strategy that has yield you enough pieces of research to answer your question without being overwhelmed by the amount of data you have.
Unit Three – Activity Seven – Self evaluation
Having written out your search strategy decide for yourself what grade you think it deserves
F D C B A
There is no evidence of having followed a systematic research process. There is minimal evidence of having followed any systematic research process. There is sound evidence of having followed a basic systematic research process. There is good evidence of having followed a sound systematic research process. There is exceptional evidence of having followed a rigorous and systematic research process.
If you are not happy with the grade decide how you can best improve it. Here are a number of ideas.
1) Make your question more specific
2) Make your question more general
3) Develop new search terms
4) Develop new inclusion and exclusion criteria
5) Use a different search engine
6) Choose specific database within the search engine
It is important in your write up to acknowledge the weaknesses in your search. In an ideal world you should try and find every piece of research that relates to your dissertation question. In reality you do not have the time and the resources to do that, so instead you can simply acknowledge the choices and compromises you made and accept that at this point in your academic career you are doing the best you can, and that you accept that others can repeat your work with more attention to detail, but that you provisionally stand by what you did as a genuine attempt to arrive at the best possible answer to your question.
Most Important
The single most important thing about your search is that your strategy should be clear, concise and easy for someone else to repeat. Due to the nature of search engines and databases there is no guarantee that someone copying your search will get exactly the same results, but they should get broadly similar ones.

Unit Four
Analysing Your Results
Aim of the Unit
This Unit aims to help you evaluate the research you have identified to establish its credibility and to determine how the research helps you answer your question. By the end of this Unit your should be able to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each piece of research you find, and to explain how the findings of the research help support your conclusion.
Introduction
An important point to remember is that each piece of research adds to the total picture. This means no single piece can provide the full answer to your question, it is only when all the evidence is considered together that you can have confidence in your conclusion. What is also important though is that some evidence is more credible than others and some is more central to your argument than others. This is what you must consider when analysing your results.
Analysing your results will take between ¼ and 1/3 of your total hours for the module. At times this will be active with your recording your reflections, at others it will be a case of mulling over ideas in your head. It is all important.
Reading Research Papers
From the research papers you have found select one that you find particularly easy to read. It is always good to start with a piece that makes sense. Then ask yourself the following questions: Who, Why, What, Where, When, So What?
Unit Four – Activity One – summarising your research
Who are the researchers?
Do not just name them, also think about what you can find out about them and think about why this makes their research credible to you.
Why did they carry out the research?
What where the researchers trying to find out? What gaps had they spotted in the previous research?
What did the researchers do?
What was their research method? How did they carry out their research? If the research involved research subjects look at who they were as well as what the researchers did.
Where did the research take place?

When did the research take place?
This is NOT the same as the date of publication. Some research begins 5 or more years before the date it is finally published.
So what?
Consider how the researchers results and conclusions relate to your dissertation question.
Evaluating Research Papers
It is a fact that some research is better designed or more comprehensive than others. There is a hierarchy of evidence when it comes to things like reliability and usefulness, with single case studies being the least likely to reliable and generalisable, and comprehensive meta-analyses being the most likely to be reliable and generalisable. Having carefully read your first paper it is important to think about how credible it is. This will allow you to give more weight to the most credible pieces of research and to exercise more caution about the less credible ones.
It is important to try and be fair and objective in this process as the tendency is to give more weight to research that agrees with us and less to research that disagrees with us, regardless of the actual quality of the research.
Unit Four – Activity Two – Evaluating the Research
On a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 means the research is so badly designed that it adds nothing to the sum total of knowledge in relation to the research question, and 10 is where the research is so comprehensive and well designed, how would you rate this piece of research?
What could the researchers have done differently to make it one point higher on that scale?
Analysing and Developing an Argument
The key thing is to repeat the above steps for each piece of research you found using your search strategy. This is an essential step in developing your argument. The themes that emerge from the research will be your evidence that supports your conclusion, and by using the strongest research to support your most important conclusions you will create a solid argument.
Unit Four – Activity Three – Main themes
Use this table to record the main themes for each piece of research you find using your search strategy.
Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4
Article 5
Article 6
Article 7
Article 8
Article 9
Article 10
Article 11
Article 12
Article 13
Article 14
Article 15
Article 16
Article 17
Article 18
Article 19
Article 20
This table can be extended if you are using more than twenty articles.
Getting Your Conclusion Clear
Your conclusion should be the best possible answer you can give to your question in the light of the evidence from your research. By the time you have analysed your research you should be able to summarise you conclusion in a few sentences.
Unit Four – Activity Four – Your conclusions
Base on the themes that have emerged from the research you have looked at, what are you conclusions?
Remember that it is perfectly possible to conclude that the evidence has not been able to provide a definitive answer to your question.
You can also point in your conclusion to where more research is needed, however if you do please be very specific about exactly what type of additional research is needed in order to answer your question.

Unit Five
Writing Your Dissertation
Aim of the Unit
This Unit aims to help you structure your write up in a way that presents a persuasive argument that answers your question. By the end of this Unit you should be able to describe what needs to go into to each section of the dissertation, and how to ensure that each section builds on the one before and leads to the one that comes afterwards.
Introduction
This Unit will not tell you how your dissertation should be set out, that is available in the Module Handbook, instead it will focus on how to write well, and that means going beyond following a pre-set layout and thinking about how to write in a way that has real impact. That begins with thinking about what effect you want to have.
Unit Five – Activity One – Having an impact
When the reader gets to the end of your dissertation what impact to you want to have had on them? How will reading your dissertation change them, or change the world?
Engage your whole heart and head here. Look beyond the grades and pleasing the marker, to how your writing could potentially make a difference that reflects your values and beliefs.
Effective Writing
Good writing is effective, it has an effect. It is also affect, in that it engages our affect, our emotions. It is important to reflect on how it does that.
Think about something you have read that has been helpful to you; what made the difference? When writing ‘works’, what makes sure it works?
Although it is possible to give a list of dos and don’ts of good writing that tends to lead to a rather mechanical form of writing. Instead you need to think for yourself and to draw on everything you have read and think about what makes some writing better than others.
Unit Five – Activity Two – What makes writing effective
Make a list of what makes writing effective.
Introduction and Opening Paragraphs
The first view things that a reader reads will have a big impact on your final grade. This is why it is essential that your make your introduction effective.
As a dissertation is a more substantial piece that any other piece of writing it is helpful to think in terms of an opening and the introduction as a whole. The opening is the first few paragraphs that set the scene for the rest of your dissertation. The introduction as a whole is where you provide an overview of the topic area.
Unit Five – Activity Three – Writing Opening Paragraphs
What things can you do in your opening paragraphs?
Having done what you need to do in your opening paragraphs you need to turn your attention to the rest of the introduction. Although the introduction is one of the first things the reader will write it may be best to have it as one of the last things you write. Although a draft introduction will help with planning your dissertation it will be hard to thoroughly and accurately write your introduction until you know for sure what you will be introducing.
Planning Your Introduction
Your introduction should provide a smooth and logical path from your question and opening paragraphs to you methods section. Although this will need to be refined in the light of your results and analysis it will be helpful to begin by drafting an outline of your introduction.
Unit Five – Activity Four – Planning Your Introduction
Use this space to plan your introduction
Having created this plan decide how you might be able to link each part of the plan so that it forms a logical whole.

Unit Six
Grading Criteria
Aim of the Unit
This Unit aims to set out the grading criteria so you are clear what is required to achieve a given grade. By the end of this Unit you should be able to describe the key grading criteria and be able to analyse your dissertation to be able to predict your final grade.
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