Requirements for the assessment:
This is an individual piece of work that represents your initial stage of research design.
Select a business and management research topic or issue with which you are familiar. This could be a topic that you are currently working on, or one that is germane for this level of study. Using this topic, critically examine how adopting one potential research approach from each of the three perspectives listed below might affect your understating of the research problem and shape the creation of a research design to address that problem.
- Realist perspectives on the research problem.
- Constructionist perspectives on the research problem.
- Interventionist (active) perspectives on the research problem.
Consider how your choice might affect the findings and outcomes of the research in terms of nature of the contribution to knowledge that might be generated and the practice oriented outcomes that could be derived.
Reflect on:
The difference(s) between realist, constructionist and interventionist, approaches to the research problem and research design
The role of researcher values for different approaches.
The required skills needed for different approaches.
How, if at all, the differences, researcher values and skills will affect your choice of approach to your dissertation.
Your previous work for DB8002, which considered the conceptual domain of a topic, may well be a starting point from which you incorporate these new ideas and approaches.
Whilst this is an assignment for this module it will often form the basis for discussing the research design choices that will form part of your thesis. Whichever options you choose for this piece, these considerations will inform your methodology chapter, as well as later chapters regarding your reflections and conclusions on your methodological choices.
Two main areas will be assessed:
- Your ability to demonstrate a systematic understanding and clear exposition of the merits of the various approaches to research design.
- Your critical evaluation and adaptation of your selected approaches and the appropriateness of these for a coherent research design to your chosen topic
Formative discussion
You will be encouraged to submit an initial ‘draft’ of your final assessment submission (your summative assignment). This will be used to provide feedback on the strategies employed in developing the work, its structure and content. It will also be used to evaluate your writing style and tone.
Feedback will be provided on all formative submissions that are received by the specified hand-in date at the start of the second session of the module.
Summative assessment
At the end of the taught modules you should prepare a 6000 words, or equivalent, document which will focus on an initial review of the literatures that you create. This review may be approached in a traditional (narrative) style or take the form of a more ‘systematic review’.
Whichever approach to the work you adopt, a view of the initial conceptual framework for your study should be presented.
