Writing your dissertation is arguably the most important piece of work in your university career. Therefore, it is essential for you to get this job done properly and hopefully you will be able to secure a better grade. In return, you should be able to graduate with a better degree. It should be noted, however, that it is more common for most students to achieve a grade of 2:1 and only the best students will be able to get a first honour.
There are several different ways to conduct a research, but they are always either qualitative or quantitative. In most cases, students are allowed to choose their research method; this guide will focus on qualitative research methods and provide students with some general guides and writing tips.
When you are working on a qualitative research dissertation, you should always explore different method to conduct your research. Some ways of qualitative research include questionnaires, semi-structured interviews or perhaps a focus group. Before you start deciding your topic, you should choose your research method.
After that, you should develop the questions you need to ask in your research. Make sure they are rather intelligible and your participants should easily understand it. Otherwise, you may not get the responses that you need and your grades will suffer as a result. In essence, you have to create something that is simple enough but also something that can demonstrate your understanding and knowledge in your field. Indeed, this may seem like a difficult task, but once you understand what you have to do, it will get much easier as you progress.
Writing is in fact the easier part. This is in relative sense of course. Doing the research and looking for participants will be much more tedious. In fact, is it more common for students to do better in the writing part, but the actual research itself is usually not as good. Some basic things to remember when you are writing your dissertation would be to keep your writing tense consistent. If you are writing in past tense, then you should just stick to it throughout the work. You should also reference properly and make sure you have referred to the relevant authors in the appropriate places. Citing random sources is not recommended, as it could be classified as a minor case of plagiarism and that is not what you want! Apart from that, writing up your dissertation is really not that difficult and you should be able to get a good grade!