1. Methodological Choice Justifications
In this part of the coursework you are required to provide a critical reflection on the key methodological approaches used in your chosen area of investigation and justify your own methodological choices.
You are required to stick to the following guidelines:
Find a number of good quality refereed academic articles in your field of research where authors describe and justify their methodological approaches well (not less than 5) ;
Start your work from a title explaining your research direction and a single paragraph (not too long) introducing the area/problem you intend to research, including aspects of it that are relevant to the following discussion.
Critically review the methods that have been used by researchers (identify the articles individually) and decide which are relevant to your research and justify why they are relevant.
Be critical and with regards to the articles you feel are not relevant, explain why they are not relevant (If you decide none are relevant, say why they are not relevant and how you intend to proceed under the circumstances – careful, this is a hard position to defend!)
When criticizing clearly name the approaches, methodologies and methods, review how researchers in the field approach setting research questions; search, present and analyze data. Reflect on whether researchers are independent (of)/involved (in) their research subjects. Relate what you say to your own proposed research investigation in detail.
Since this is an early stage in your research this will involve considerable guesswork on your part as to what your research will consist of. Please don’t worry about this because speculation will assist in your critical reflection. Nobody is going to hold you to any choices or arguments you make at this stage. The point is to test your awareness and understanding of the issues, as it may be relevant to your research. Be critical of your own position – a reflexive awareness of the difficulties of any approach/position is more important (in this assignment) than trying to defend any particular position.
Throughout the text refer specifically to the sources you have read and the positions/arguments by using the Harvard referencing style. This section should not be longer than 1,900 words.
2. Draft of the Research Instrument
In this part you are required to design a draft of your proposed questionnaire or interview questions / answer options based on research question of interest. It should not be longer than 1000 words.
• If you intend to use a questionnaire, make sure you draft the key questions and option answers in a clear style (at all time, think of your potential respondents);
• If you intend to use an interview, develop the questions and briefly explain what kind of answers you are hoping to receive from your potential respondents;
• If you propose to use secondary data, you need to be very specific which data sources or databases you are going to use, what kind of data you intend to find and how you are going to interrogate it. You still will need to develop questions which could help you to analyze the data in the data sets.