Formulating a Research Question for Business or Management Dissertation

Formulate a research question(s)/ hypotheses relevant to Business/Management with clearly defined objectives, identify an appropriate methodology and prepare a proposal for a dissertation.

Rationale

The dissertation is the culmination of the MBA and provides you with an opportunity to demonstrate what you have learned on the course and that you have acquired the necessary skills to independently undertake a substantial piece of work under the guidance of a supervisor. The dissertation aims to enable you to demonstrate your ability to design, conduct, evaluate and write up a project on a topic that is relevant to your interests. In so doing, you will be able to demonstrate self-direction, enquiry, originality and an ability to act autonomously in the planning and implementation of project skills at an advanced and professional level. It is a significant piece of evidence-based work, which demonstrates your ability to qualify for the award of MBA. The research study has a business focus that is appropriate to your career aspirations and is of greater depth and conceptual complexity than a normal assignment.

Summative Assessment Summary

This assessment consists of a 1500-word proposal for a dissertation, which constitutes 20% of the total module marks. The proposal will be submitted online via Moodle. The details of the assignment brief are given below. You are strongly argued to read the briefs carefully and in conjunction with the marking grid at the end of this document.

Dissertation proposal

You are required to write a 1500-word proposal for a dissertation based on a business and/management topic relevant to MBA. To start with, you will formulate or be given a topic for the dissertation, give background information about the organisation and the chosen topic, research question(s), aim and objectives, rationale and significance/importance of the topic and/or hypotheses where applicable to the organisation. You should also provide an outline and rationale of the methodology you will use on the project and background literature/theory underpinning your research topic/question/hypotheses together with limitations. You should also provide a GANTT or that flowchart showing how you propose to proceed with the project.

NB: The proposal may subject to some changes eventually form the 1st chapter of the dissertation. Formative Assessment and feedback

Learning outcome 1 formative assessment will be obtained via the comments of supervisors on draft material in one to one tutorials and via Moodle forums.

Dissertation guidance handbook

The Dissertation handbook is a separate document that you can access via Moodle on the module site. You are required to read this carefully as that is what your supervisor will follow. The handbook also includes the Internship project supervision record forms that you will be required to complete after each supervision meeting. It also contains the ethical approval form that you should complete and signed off by your supervisor before you start collecting your data.

All work should be referenced using the Harvard format – there are handouts available online at the library website and are available as hard copy in the library if you are unsure of this.

- Exercise caution when using Wikipedia, Google or Yahoo – the former is not peer assessed and the work is not always reliable and the later are search engines. Do not rely too heavily or exclusively on such sources.

- Use textbooks and journal articles (newspaper articles may at times be acceptable). You should however, make more reliance on journal articles as these are peer reviewed and are often more recent than text books. If you are to use textbooks, these should be the latest so it is important to check whether you have the latest edition. Citations should be used very minimally and in limited circumstances, you may reference lecture material such as handouts and presentation slides.