What ethical issues does your research raise?
Literature review
- Revise your literature review content so you have removed any irrelevant or overly descriptive material
- Ensure your content is organised in clearly defined paragraphs
- Write short, concise sentences which clearly state your key points (supported by evidence, correctly cited)
- Present your rationale for the research you are proposing (i.e. why are you doing this research, what’s the point?)
- Finish your literature review by clearly stating the aim/s of your research and explicitly state what your research question/s is/are. For example, ‘What is the impact of pupils’ poor mental health on teachers’ wellbeing?’
REMEMBER TO ASK YOURSELF:
- Is the question feasible?
- Is the question clear?
- Is the question significant?
- Is the question ethical?
Methodology Section
You will decide on your methodology and choose your research method/s. This must be the most appropriate choice for your research question; you need to justify this.
Design
- Identify your research design, for example a qualitative study
Methods/s
- State which data collection method/s you will use and why (e.g. by observation, interviews, a survey, a corpus)? For example, for the research question above, a focus group method was selected as the most appropriate technique because….
Analysis
- Describe the process you will use to analyse the data. Will the analysis involve using specialist software? For the example above, ‘Focus group data will be thematically analysed manually’.
Ethics
You must consider ethical issues in relation to your research study and refer to BERA guidelines: https://www.bera.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/BERA-Ethical-Guidelines-for-Educational-Research_4thEdn_2018.pdf?noredirect=1
Consider: What ethical issues does your research raise? Are human participants involved?
