ESSAY TIPS - Q1

When you have collected material from a range of sources and used a variety of methods, your next step will be to start to shape it for the exam itself. In the first lesson for this, we will help you to see how you might organise your material effectively; in the meantime, if you look at the examples on the M drive, you will have a good idea of how to do it.

Q1: Overall you will need: an introduction, a paragraph or two on each method, including proper referencing and examples as well as a consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of the method itself. The whole thing needs to be sequenced logically so that there is a sense of your research being a journey. You will need to reflect on the way you conducted and processed your research not just the methods and sources themselves. You will need to demonstrate links between your stages and show how one thing led to another.

There are well known advantages and disadvantages to the popular methods which you will need to reflect on. You will need to talk about how you anticipated these and adapted accordingly or how these were usfeul/problematic to you and why. It is important to be extremely humble about your research, and to recognise that there are things you would do differently in hindsight, with more experience behind you. There are many experienced academics conducting similar types of research and they would always conduct a thorough evaluation of their work before it was published. This enables interested parties to see what the limitations of the research were and how these limitations impacted on the outcomes and final results.

How to answer Q1:
On the whole this needs a lot of references to actual examples from the research methods, with full referencing such as author, title, publisher, date (for a book), plus a full explanation of what was in the source and a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of the method. You need a brief introduction which sets out which area you are investigating and what your specific focus is.

1. You then need a paragraph (or two) on each of your methods, which should include at least four secondary and at least two primary.
2. Each paragraph needs to include an account of the method, which will involve some explanation, examples (for secondary) of two sources, fully referenced and their content briefly explained, at least one specific detail from each source (e.g. a quote) and an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the method overall.
3. You should end with a conclusion, which again should be brief and just sum up your main points.

Your FINDINGS can be left to Q.2

Extra tips: leave a line between each paragraph, don't make your paragraph last more than a page, highlight key points if you want.