Doing Your Masters Dissertation

Chris Hart

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446229477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Doing Your Masters Dissertation is a practical and comprehensive guide to researching, preparing and writing a dissertation at Masters level. It adopts a well-structured and logical approach, and takes the student through all the stages necessary to complete their research and write a successful dissertation.

Key features of the book include:

• Step-by-step coverage - sections on choosing a topic, research design, methodology and presenting data and writing up
• An up-to-date list of key reference materials, both printed and electronic
• Advice on ethical guidelines
• Information on assessment criteria
• Student-focused throughout with a broad range of worked examples and guidelines for further reading.

Written in an engaging and accessible manner, this textbook is an essential resource for postgraduate students across the social sciences required to complete a Masters dissertation.
SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, resources and videos on study success!

Part One

Essential Preparation for Your Dissertation

1

What is a Masters?

CHAPTER CONCEPTS

•THE MASTERS AS A LICENCE TO DO RESEARCH • WHAT IS A MASTERS DISSERTATION? • DISSERTATION OR THESIS? • THE DISSERTATION AS PART OF A MASTERS COURSE • CRITERIA USED TO ASSESS A DISSERTATION • MARKING RANGES AND FAILURE • CRITERIA AND THE EXAMINER • DIFFERENT TYPES OF DISSERTATION • HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO DO A MASTERS DISSERTATION? • ARE YOU CAPABLE OF DOING A MASTERS DISSERTATION? • A MASTERS IS NO MOUNTAIN • WHERE TO DO YOUR MASTERS • WHAT TO LOOK FOR • LEARNING AND TEACHING STYLES • COURSE SPECIFICATIONS • SUMMARY OF THIS CHAPTER • FURTHER READING

Increasingly more and more people are undertaking a masters level degree course (MA, MSc and MBA). The majority of these courses entail a dissertation of between 10,000 and 15,000 words. The dissertation is still seen as an essential element of the masters degree. In this chapter we look at what we mean by a masters dissertation, at the range of skills, capabilities, attitudes and qualities doing a masters will give you, at how a masters is normally assessed and at the different kinds of dissertation you can do. Our basic premise is that doing a masters dissertation is much more than a skills-based exercise. The purpose of this chapter is, therefore, to answer some basic but essential questions:

1 What is a masters dissertation?

2 What kind of document is a masters dissertation?

3 How long should a dissertation be?

4 What kinds of skills and capabilities will you need to do your dissertation?

Doing a masters dissertation should, we argue, allow you to experience a series of higher-level educational, intellectual and ethical issues which help you to grow as a person and a professional. We begin, therefore, by placing the masters in the conventional context of the Bachelors and Doctorate degrees.

The masters as a licence to do research

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It was only in the late nineteenth century that the titles we know as the Bachelors, Masters and Doctorate became formal academic qualifications generally recognized around the world. Although they have their origins in the ancient universities when they were Church institutions, the range of modern higher degrees owes little to these origins. Table 1.1 shows the traditional roles of the main university degrees alongside a definition of current roles.

Although the scheme in Table 1.1 has its origins in the time when the Church controlled universities, and degrees, diplomas or licences to teach were awarded by the Church, the only remaining vestiges of this are the academic gowns used to signify different qualifications. In the 1400s the cleric masters wore black robes lined with lamb’s wool or rabbit’s fur (for warmth) that were trimmed with exotic fur, usually miniver, which also trimmed their hoods. A feature of their robes was colour. Medieval masters enjoyed a wide variety of colours for their robes to such excess that Oxford and Cambridge Universities under Henry VIII began prescribing academic dress as a matter for university control. The drab blackness of robes only became a feature during the seventeenth century when Puritanism dominated the universities and the Church. The range of colours we see today designating masters in different disciplines had its beginnings in the United States. From 1895 American universities and colleges opted to follow a definite system of colours and standards for academic gowns; for economics the colour is copper, for education light blue and for social work it is citron. British and European universities follow no such standards except that each university or awarding body has generally settled on using one colour to signify their institution.

The only other link to the ancient past is the nature of the masters as a licence to practice. In the modern sense this licence is an acknowledgement of research skills and abilities. In modern masters courses the dissertation is research oriented. It is intended to help the student acquire the necessary skills and capacities to undertake a substantial piece of coherent research. Taking this as our starting point, we will focus on the masters dissertation as a piece of independent research to be successfully completed as part of a masters course.

TABLE 1.1 BACHELORS, MASTERS AND DOCTORATE RESEARCH

Degree	Traditional and current role	Research features
Bachelors	A measure of a general education in terms of developing the skills of critical evaluation but specializing in a topic, e.g. twentieth-century history.	Small-scale independent project usually related to a taught module and used as the ‘honours’ element of the degree.
Masters	Originally a licence to practice theology and now a measure of advanced knowledge of a topic.	An independent piece of research focusing on the selection and analysis of a topic, design of the research, its execution and presentation as a dissertation.
Doctorate	Originally a licence to practice as a teacher in a university and now signifies authority on the current knowledge of a subject with the ability to make a contribution to that knowledge.	An independent piece of research focusing beyond the selection and analysis of a topic, design of the research, its execution, demonstration of a high and consistent level of analysis, evaluation, and contemplation to make an original contribution to knowledge and presentation as a thesis.

What is a masters dissertation?

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Within the context of the modern taught masters course, the dissertation is a significant and substantial learning activity. Its purpose is to give you the opportunity to demonstrate your ‘mastery’ of the skills of analysis, synthesis, evaluation, argumentation and data collection and handling by applying them to a specific topic. In addition there are other skills, such as writing, qualities, such as determination, and attitudes, such as honesty, which are necessary and we will come to these shortly. Taken together these abilities are expected to be acquired and applied to produce a coherent and reasoned piece of research.

The language used to define the dissertation tends to differ between various universities and awarding bodies. This language includes terms and phrases such as the following, but as you can see they are generally unhelpful:

• an extended treatment of a topic;
• research done for a masters degree; or
• a piece of empirical research and writing.

The following definition from Yale University states that the dissertation student attains:

technical mastery of the field of specialization, is capable of doing independent scholarly work, and is able to formulate conclusions that will in some respect modify or enlarge what has been previously known. (Yale, 1975: 182)

Masters level research is, therefore, a display of your ability to identify a topic, justify that topic, write clear aims and objectives which are interrelated, search and review the relevant literature, design data collection tools, apply those tools, manage the data collection and make sense of it. This may also include making conclusions and recommendations. It is these abilities, listed in Table 1.2, which make the masters dissertation technically a substantial piece of work and significant both intellectually and personally (Appendix 1 provides an extended list of these).

DISSERTATION OR THESIS?

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The statement from Yale (in the section above) is a definition of their doctorate (PhD) and not masters degree. This highlights a difference between many British and American universities. Most universities in North America call a PhD a dissertation and the masters a thesis, while most British universities call the PhD the thesis and the masters the dissertation. In this book we will use the word ‘dissertation’ for masters research and ‘thesis’ for doctorate research. This is because, when used in a research proposal or monograph, the word ‘thesis’ means theory maintained by an argument and as such refers to the dialectic nature of a piece of writing. While a masters has some elements of argumentation and discussion the reason for these is not the production of an original contribution to knowledge. The role of argument and theory in the mast...