Master in Research

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Over the last weeks I have been working on my own research proposal which is central part to the first essays of this year. Although for this first year we do not have to perform the actual research, we do have to write up the proposal as well as setting up the questionnaire.

A research proposal consists in general of the following parts:

• Introduction: which explains why you are performing this research
• Questionnaire: outlining what kind of questions and subjects you want to ask during your survey. This is not the actual questionnaire, which will be a separate part
• Sampling: who is your target group, how many of those do you want to ask and where are they
• Methodology: what is the set up of the research, is this face to face interviews, postal / online questionnaires, focus groups, etc.
• Analysis: what are you going to measure, how do you measure it, what kind of statistical analysis are you performing to validate your data and use as foundation for your conclusions
• Ethical appendix: in this section you have to think about any problems that might occur when asking your questions, are there any possibilities that people might not want to participate.
• Literature review: what research has already been performed in your area, what does this mean to your proposal, are those studies useful or not and why
• Project Plan: outline of what you are going to do when
• Bibliography

For my research proposal I have chosen the following: What is the profile of successful Internet Entrepreneurs.

Why this subject?

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Technorati Tags: analysis, bibliography, ethical appendix, ethics, internet entrepreneur, introduction, literature review, methodology, project plan, questionnaire, sample, statistics

As explained previously, when asking questions you have to take into account the respondent’s willingness to answer those questions.  In some cases you will have the risk of a social desirable effect, in other words the answers will reflect what the person thinks should be, rather than what they truthfully are.

This is an inherent issue with every survey performed but there are ways to minimise this.

First of all you have to set up your questions based on the following criteria:   Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: consistent, measure, questionnaire, reliable, SPSS, standard deviation, standard error, standardisation, statistics, validity