Posted: June 27th, 2015
Dissertation structure
Introduction – needs to be punchy, engaged, lively … try and give the impression that this is a dissertation that needs to be read. The person that’s marking it needs to get the sense that you’re excited about what you’ve got to say.
Good ones often use a ‘hook’ – a short story or poem or interest piece that grabs attention.
Then needs brief overview of dissertation structure, aims objectives, purpose of the project, and summary of the conclusions.
Literature Review – this section needs to show a real depth of understanding of all the work that’s gone before. Don’t write a literature review that says ‘this person did/said x, y and z, and this person said a, b and c.’ That style of literature review will only produce a surface level understanding.
Instead try and pull apart the contradictions and tensions in what’s been written before about your topic – you might be able to find an area where you can contribute or say something original.
The literature review also needs to have a funnel structure, starting with something broad, and then narrowing down to the more specific aspects of your own research topic. It sometimes makes sense to have subheadings if there are a few themes to the literature.
It doesn’t need to be everything that’s ever been said that has any vague resemblance to your own – that can often be impossible, and depth is always better than breadth. But you also need to show that, in the background to this depth, there is a good understanding of other work.
Methods – By the end of your literature review you should be able to define your own topic. You then need to show how you went about researching it.
Typically, there are three parts to a methods section – the underlying principles of your approach, the way you collected the things you’ll be analyzing, and the methods you used to make sense of your material.
The first section will be about approaches e.g. are you taking a social constructionist, symbolic interactionist, feminist, poststructuralist etc ect approach, or a combination of approaches (and if a combination, how do these approaches fit together, are there any tensions). What are the theoretical lenses you’re using to make sense of your project? You might want to think about what kinds of knowledge that sort of approach might produce in comparison to others.
You then need to give detail on the things you collected e.g. if it’s a television programme, when was it made, who are the target audience, what are the viewing figures, and so on. If it’s more field based, e.g. interviews, when where and how did they take place, how did you recruit. It can also be good to give info on the experience of doing this – how did it feel.
Finally, you need to talk and show an understanding of the methods of analysis e.g. textual, semiotic, visual, discourse, autoethnographic, thematic, phenomenological, reflexive.
You need to make sure you understand your method of analysis well, and that it makes sense in relation to the other sections e.g. if you say your approach is realist, and you then claim to be doing a discourse analysis, something’s not right! Equally, a visual analysis of interviews might create some problems, unless you used visual texts in the interviews (although it would be expected that you’d still want to do something with the spoken text).
Analysis – this is the section of the dissertation where it really is over to you!
You do need to demonstrate that the work in the first half of the dissertation relates to your analysis (and this is a good reason for starting to write the dissertation here), but this section should be about your application of everything that’s gone before.
So you need to show when the theories discussed in your literature review are evident in your own analysis. You’ll also need to demonstrate the ideas that you mentioned in the methods section – e.g. is this really a textual, semiotic, visual, discourse, autoethnographic, thematic, phenomenological, reflexive analysis.
Discussion – Don’t bring in anything new! This is a summary and a pulling together of everything that’s been said, showing where the links and potential future work could be developed based on your own ideas.
Highlight the originality of your work and demonstrate that the work hangs together. And end on something punchy!
TIPS
A good trick for getting over this is to provide plenty of examples, e.g. (!) ‘Female celebrities are often valued on the basis of their performance of a beautiful body (Refs). The value placed on the female celebrity body was evident, for example, when during Demi Moore’s divorce from Ashton Kutcher, the media focus was on how well Moore could maintain the same image of stylish femininity’.
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