Analysis Plan For Amount Of Recycled Concrete In India (Essay).

1. Why the new techniques in the construction waste management is not available in India?
2. Why the application of recycled aggregate not used in India effectively?

The aim of this research paper is to develop an analysis plan for amount of recycled concrete that gets generated from the waste of the construction and demolition works in India and to investigate the construction areas, where recycled aggregates or waste can be used effectively. It also aims to find out the impact of the recycled aggregates on the project cost and sustainability of the construction industry.

The rationale of a research paper highlights the gap in the previous research studies and the opportunities that the new research study proposes to address the gap (Hancock and Algozzine 2016). In this section, the researcher offers the set of reasons that he is using to conduct further research on a particular topic. This section constitutes an important part of the research study due to the fact that through the rationale of the study, the researcher throws a light on the factors that are evoking the research. A topic has multiple aspects and different people have different views about that particular topic. Hence, a particular topic is being addressed by different authors with different perspectives. A research study allows the researcher to highlight any gap in the previous literature and address that gap with supporting data (Creswell and Poth 2017). Research rationale presents the reasons that provide the scope to a researcher to look into the new issues of a phenomenon and throw light on a new angle to address the issue. To do that, the researcher uses suitable methodology and collects relevant data to support the arguments.

In the given research study, the research is conducted on the construction waste management in India. The previous literatures focused on the construction industry of India and waste management. But, none of the literatures focused on waste management in the construction industry and effective usage of recycled waste in India. Various authors have highlighted the issues of the construction industry in India and how it is damaging the environment. Some authors focused on the amount of waste generated from the construction industry. Along with that, some scholars have written about the techniques used for recycling and reusing the waste from the construction industry. However, the application of the recycled wastes and aggregates is not widely done in India and it is also not researched by scholars. In this research paper, the absence of new and advanced techniques in the waste management of the construction industry of India and ineffective application of the recycled aggregates constitute the research topic. It has highlighted the problem of high cost in the construction projects due to the fact that the industry cannot recycle and reuse the demolition waste. There is lack of improved technologies in the construction industry of India, which leads to inefficient waste management in this industry, thereby cannot achieve sustainability. Through this research, the researcher will be focusing on the factors contributing in the absence of new techniques in the waste management in the construction sector and how to address the problem by recycling and reusing the demolition waste to achieve sustainability and lower cost in the future projects.

Research objectives

The research rationale is important to the discipline, practice and end users due to the reason that it highlights the reasons that evoke the research plan and issues in the topic.

The research objectives are as follows:

• To find out and analyze the economical method of construction waste management in India
• To identify the factors influencing the application of the recycled aggregates
• To study and analyze the impact of the recycled aggregates on the construction industry
• To identify the drawbacks of the recycling methods
• To identify the cost effectiveness of the waste management in the construction industry of India

The research study will focus on the various aspects of the recycled aggregates and implication of its usage in the construction industry of India. The construction industry generates a huge amount of waste every year that is affecting the environmental sustainability and profitability of the companies. The lack of new innovative technologies is leading to the heavy cost and increasing amount of waste in the construction industry of India and that will be addressed by the researcher in this research study.

The research project will continue for two years as it requires in depth review of the literatures, secondary data collection and analysis, and presentation of the findings to support the arguments. In the first year, only few of the objectives can be fulfilled. Among the research objectives stated above, the researcher will focus on the first two objectives in the first year. The first two objectives focus on the economical method of construction waste management and the factors influencing the application of the recycled aggregates in the construction industry of India. The researcher will follow the abduction system of inquiry to address the research objectives.

There are three types of research inquiry that can be used in a research paper. Those are induction, deduction and abduction. As stated by Woo, O'Boyle and Spector (2017), induction system focuses on exploring a research phenomenon in a completely new angle and generating a new theory from that. In this method, the researcher should be free from a preconceived notion and must approach the issue in a totally new perspective. Hence, the inductive approach of research is concerned with generation of new theory from the findings (Mojtahed et al. 2014). According to Shaw (2017), the deductive approach focuses on testing an already established theory. The emphasis is put on the causality and the application of an established theory to test the research phenomenon is important. Hence, inferencing from the relevant theory is essential in this type of research approach (Sekaran and Bougie 2016). Apart from that, there is another type of system inquiry, called abduction. As stated by Ary et al. (2018), abductive research approach involves inferencing the most likely event from a set of observations. In other words, the researcher logically inferences a possible event from some observations around the research issue. Usually, the researcher starts with a potential explanation of the research topic and if it is not proved to be true following from the evidences collected, then he moves on to the next one  and start gathering evidences (Bernard 2017).

Research inquiry

In majority of the research studies, the deductive approach is usually adopted. The researcher chooses a research topic and frames problem statement or research hypothesis based on that. Then he tests the hypothesis on the basis of a relevant theory or answers the research questions with the help of some suitable theory(s) (Voss, Johnson and Godsell 2015). However, in the research projects for architecture and construction, the researchers prefer to use the abduction system of inquiry. In the given research, the researcher will choose the abductive approach of research. In this study, the researcher has planned to gather relevant data about the construction waste management in India, the amount and properties of recycled aggregates, problems in the application of the recycled aggregates of the construction and demolition waste and its cost effectiveness. After collecting the data, the researcher will make a proposition about the solution and will present the insights. He will again present alternative propositions and will do the critical analysis based on the theories, will be testing the data using statistical analytical tools, and will make inferences about the findings. In the first year of the research study, the researcher will focus on finding and analyzing the cost effective method for waste management in the construction industry of India and identifying the factors that impact the application of the recycled aggregates in the construction management. In this regard, the abduction system of inquiry would be the most suitable method. By this approach, the researcher will be applying the supportive argument from the relevant theories to achieve the objectives of the research. As the researcher is not inventing any new theory or testing any theory, the best method to carry on the research is the abductive approach (Tavory and Timmermans 2014). Under this approach, the researcher will support the collected data with the help of scientific analysis and explore the research topic through propositions and their critical analysis.

Table 1: Plan for one year of research

(Created by author)

For doing the research, the researcher will be choosing case studies and combined strategies approach. In the case studies and combined strategies method, the researcher studies and analyzes the data based on certain phenomenon, event or organization. Case studies are helpful in a research by presenting a similar situation like the research topic with the similar characteristics (Zainal 2017). In this course, the researcher will take interviews of the people associated with the construction industry and waste management and analyze their response to get important information. The research approach will involve the people from the construction industry and waste management in India and the researcher will conduct a survey or interviews to get information about the research subject and apply either qualitative or quantitative or both the methods for analysis.

Research plan and timeline

Reference to another relevant research using similar approach

The research by T. Sekar, N. Ganesan and NVN Nampoothiri, ‘Studies on strength characteristics on utilization of waste materials as coarse aggregate in concrete’ (2011), has followed the similar approach of research as in the current research. From the study, it is seen that, the researchers have focused on the utilization of the recycled aggregates in the construction industry of India and they have adopted the abduction system of inquiry for writing the paper. The conclusion is drawn based on the propositions made and tested against the observations and the established theories.

Sequence of methods:

• Following the abduction system of inquiry, as stated by Groat and Wang (2015)
• The tactics of ‘Case studies and combined methods’ will be applied to get a broad overview of the research subject
• Combined methods include both the aspects of science and humanities. The data will be evaluated based on subjectivity, following humanities approach and through rationality, and objectivity following scientific analysis.
• The researcher will next follow the scientific empirical system of enquiry as stated by Fellows and Liu (2015) in ‘Research Methods for Construction’.
• The primary and secondary data will be collected from various sources and will be analyzed using qualitative and quantitative analytics.
• After the analysis, the relationships among the variables or patterns in the data will be presented to explain the causality to fulfill the objectives.
• Insights and references will be presented, followed by conclusion and recommendation.

This sequence of methodology is most appropriate compared to other methods, such as, historical research, qualitative research or correlational research.

• Under historical research, the researcher only focuses on the historical data and analyses those without looking into the factors that have emerged in the recent times due to advanced technology.
• Qualitative research only focuses on the data analysis based on the ethnography, phenomenology and grounded theory, that is dependent on the human attributes. It does not test the data scientifically.
• Under correlational research, the researcher needs to establish a relation among the variables and test the data using scientific method. This method does not include qualitative analysis and sometimes it ignores many humanitarian factors that may have a significant impact on the results.

Thus, the research aim and objectives of this research study would be best fulfilled by following the combined research methods, that is, through the application of the qualitative and quantitative research method.

In this project, the researcher will follow the case study and combined strategies for addressing the research subject. Initially, he needs to submit his research plan and get approval from his supervisor. Once it is approved, he will start with literature review and choosing the methodology. He will be designing few interview questions and survey questionnaire to collect primary data on the recycling and reusing the construction and demolition waste in the construction management in India. He will be choosing few employees of one major company in this industry for conducting the survey and interview. After that, he will be collecting secondary data from various authentic sources, such as, official websites, newspapers, online publications, journals etc. after collecting the data, the researcher will analyze the data using qualitative and quantitative methods to achieve his research objectives. Finally, he will present the findings in a comprehensive manner, establish a link with the research objectives, and present some recommendations based on that in the concluding chapter of the project.

In this section, the 11 weeks plan for the research will be presented. The plan below depicts the way that the researcher can follow to complete the entire research within 11 weeks. In the these 11 weeks, the focus of the researcher will be on the outlining the research, writing the proposal, getting the approval and proceed with the literature review, data collection and analysis and presenting the findings by establishing a link with the objecives. The researcher will break the entire project into small tasks and allocate the time accordingly. The project is expected to start from March 5, 2018 and will continue for 11 weeks.

Table 2: Plan for 11 weeks of research

The annotated diagram of the 11 weeks project plan is prepared using the MS Project tool. In this tool, the working hours is taken as 20 hours per week. The entire plan is broken into multiple tasks and working hours is allocated accordingly.

References

Ary, D., Jacobs, L.C., Irvine, C.K.S. and Walker, D., 2018. Introduction to research in education. Cengage Learning.

Bernard, H.R., 2017. Research methods in anthropology: Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Rowman & Littlefield.

Creswell, J.W. and Poth, C.N., 2017. Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches. Sage publications.

Fellows, R.F. and Liu, A.M., 2015. Research methods for construction. John Wiley & Sons.

Groat, L. and Wang, D., 2015. Architectural Research Methods. 2nd ed. Wiley.

Hancock, D.R. and Algozzine, B., 2016. Doing case study research: A practical guide for beginning researchers. Teachers College Press.

Mojtahed, R., Nunes, M.B., Martins, J.T. and Peng, A., 2014. Equipping the Constructivist Researcher: The Combined use of Semi-Structured Interviews and Decision-Making maps. Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods, 12(2).

Sekaran, U. and Bougie, R., 2016. Research methods for business: A skill building approach. John Wiley & Sons.

Shaw, J.D., 2017. Advantages of starting with theory. Academy of Management Journal, 60(3), pp.819-822.

Tavory, I. and Timmermans, S., 2014. Abductive analysis: Theorizing qualitative research. University of Chicago Press.

Voss, C., Johnson, M. and Godsell, J., 2015. Revisiting case research in operations management. In 22nd International Annual EurOMA Conference.

Woo, S.E., O'Boyle, E.H. and Spector, P.E., 2017. Best practices in developing, conducting, and evaluating inductive research.

Zainal, Z., 2017. Case study as a research method. Jurnal Kemanusiaan, 5(1).

Sekar, T., Ganesan, N. and Nampoothiri, N., 2011. Studies on strength characteristics on utilization of waste materials as coarse aggregate in concrete,2014,waste management. International Journal of Engineering Science and Technology, 3(7), pp.5436-5440.