How To Do Your Dissertation in Geography and Related Disciplines

Tony Parsons, Peter G Knight

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367475321
• eBook ISBN: 9781317909194
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book provides undergraduates with a step-by-step guide to successfully carrying out an independent research project or dissertation. The book addresses each stage of the project by answering the questions that a student is likely to ask as the work progresses from choosing the subject area and planning the data collection through to producing illustrations and writing the final report. Most undergraduates in geography and related disciplines are required to undertake individual projects as part of their degree course; this book is a source of constructive, practical advice.

This new third edition continues the tradition of friendly, well-informed but informal support, and continues to focus on answering the specific questions that students typically ask at each stage of the project. The new edition brings the text completely up to date by taking into account changes within the discipline and changes in the ways that students work. New digital media, social networking, mobile technology, e-journals, anti-plagiarism software, ethics approval rules and risk assessments are among the issues that this new edition takes into account. The new edition also broadens the book's appeal by extending its coverage of the wide range of different approaches to geographical research, with expanded coverage of qualitative research, Geographic Information Systems, and new approaches to research design in both physical and human geographies

1

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explains what the book is trying to achieve and how you can use the book to get the most out of it.

The aim of this book

The aim of this book is to help you to do the best dissertation you possibly can, and to help you to get the highest possible mark for it. This book can’t write your dissertation for you, but it can help you to write it to the very best of your ability. We think you can probably do better than you expect.

In theory, your dissertation should get you one of your highest marks. It’s like an exam where you set the question yourself and have a whole year to find the answer, getting information, help and advice from as many sources as you want. However, some students end up being disappointed with the marks they get for the dissertation, and most students do not do as well as they could. This book is for them.

If you have to write a dissertation, then this book is here to help!

The book is intended to be useful not only for geography students, including those specializing in particular areas of human geography, physical geography or environmental geography, but also for students in related disciplines from across the social sciences, earth sciences and environmental sciences. It is often unwise to try to define the boundaries between these disciplines too precisely, and many of the topics that we will use as examples could be tackled by student projects from all sorts of different degree routes. For example, is a project on rewilding urban areas a biogeography project, or an urban geography project, or an environmental sustainability project? Is a place-hacking dissertation an urban project or a political geography project or a crime geography project? Is a project using art to communicate ideas about climate change through deep time geography, geology or something else entirely? Questions about rewilding, or art–science collaborations, or place-hacking, or any of the other million topics you might chose for your dissertation, can be addressed by students from all sorts of different backgrounds. We take geography as our starting point, but ‘Geography and Related Disciplines’ covers a very wide area of interests and approaches.

How to use this book

This book will be of help to you from now until the time you finish your dissertation. Don’t just put the book away on the shelf after you’ve glanced through it. Keep it open on your desk, or in the file or box (or pile on the bedroom floor) with the rest of your dissertation material. As your dissertation progresses you should be able to use this book as a constant source of advice. The book is arranged a little bit like a workshop manual or cookery book. After this introductory section, the book takes in turn each stage that you will need to go through in your work – each of the elements of the dissertation – and suggests ways of tackling the job. It is very much a ‘how to …’ reference book.

It would be a good idea to read through the whole book quickly right at the outset. Don’t plough through it too diligently at this stage; just skip through it to see what it’s all about. Maybe read the summaries at the beginning and end of each chapter. It will help to give you a clear idea of the steps that lie ahead in your dissertation. You’ll need to know what’s involved in the later stages of dissertation preparation even while you are planning the early stages, and if you have a good overview of the ground you will find it easier to put each stage of your work in context.

We’ve written this book as a linear narrative: going in turn through each of the steps involved in a dissertation. We have done that because it makes the book easier for you to use. For example, if you want information on writing up your dissertation, we’ve put it all together in Chapter 9. But actually doing a dissertation isn’t such a simple linear process. For example, you cannot wait until after you have written the whole dissertation before you start to think about the format of your reference list. You need to make sure that you have all the information that you will need to format your references correctly (Chapter 9) even as you do the background reading to your study (Chapter 4). Similarly, when you are preparing material for your research proposal (Chapter 6) you should be thinking ahead to how you will be able to re-use that material when you write your methods section (Chapter 9).

Having a quick look through the whole book before you start is probably a good idea.

As you start serious work on your dissertation, you will find a chapter of the book dedicated to each of the tasks you have to do. Re-read the relevant chapter as each stage of your work approaches. Some of the chapters include step-by-step procedures that you can adopt to carry you through sections of the project. Throughout the book, generally at the end of each chapter, we have included ‘reminders’ or ‘instructions’ of the type: ‘When you’ve read this chapter, do this …’ If you are using the book, as we hope, as a manual or guide book, then following these instructions will ensure that everything is going according to plan, and that your work is on target. The idea behind the instructions is that people often find that having specific tasks or checklists forces them to focus their attention more directly than having only general advice.

This book does not replace, supersede or in any way supplant your institutional guidelines. Your department will have its own rules and regulations about dissertations, which you must follow. Your department will allocate you a supervisor or academic advisor, and you must follow your supervisor’s advice. If the advice in this book conflicts with the rules of your institution or the advice of your supervisor, then follow their rules and advice. Some of the rules relate to issues like the size of your typeface, the colour of your binding or whether you have to submit both electronic and paper versions of the text, which clearly won’t affect the basis of your work and can be sorted out near to the completion of the project. Other rules might be more fundamental. For example, your institution may have particularly strict rules about how long your dissertation must be, or what type of topic you are allowed to choose, or whether you need to collect primary data. Most institutions allow you to ask your tutor to read a preliminary draft of your dissertation (or part of it), whereas others, strangely, do not. You should check straight away what your institution expects and allows. Get hold of the official guidelines as soon as possible. Most departments have a formal handbook for the dissertation, which may be a paper document or something online. If your handbook is online but you are working on your dissertation materials as hard copy it is probably worth printing out key sections of the handbook to keep with your other materials. If you are working entirely electronically, make sure you keep the official handbook (and our e-book!) together in the same folder with your other dissertation work. If you work on several different computers you might consider using a cloud storage account such as Dropbox to keep all of your dissertation work together where you can access it from home, university or on the road. If you do print a paper copy of the handbook, remember to check the online version for updates from time to time. It’s really important to make sure that you get a copy of the handbook and to make sure you read it very, very carefully. A surprising number of serious problems can arise if you don’t follow the rules. Most lecturers find that their most frequent response to student questions about dissertations is ‘That information is in the handbook!’ Read it.

We have tried to make the book as ‘user-friendly’ as possible, and to leave it up to you exactly how to use it.

We’ve broken the text up into chapters and sections in such a way that you can select only what is relevant to your specific needs at particular times. For example, if you are not doing any fieldwork in your project, then obviously you don’t want to wade through the sections about fieldwork. If you are following a positivist critical-rationalist approach to research design, you don’t need to dwell on our discussions of qualitative methods in geographical research. Having said that, we suggest that you take at least a quick look at everything – it might give you some ideas that you would otherwise not have considered, and it might help you to decide exactly what you do, and don’t, want to do. Each chapter includes a brief summary at the start, so you can check in advance to see if you need to read the whole chapter and you can check afterwards to remind yourself of the key points. We’ve separated special sections like the ‘reminders’ out of the main text so that you can easily ignore them if you wish, and we’ve highlighted key issues with short, clearly signposted, sections of text. Each chapter has a short summary at the end to remind you of the main points of what that chapter is about.

Bear in mind that we’ve written this book in a pretty informal style, but that your dissertation is a more formal piece of work. We hope that you’ll use the book as a source of sound advice, but we don’t encourage you to copy our informal tone in your own work!

How to use your supervisor

As well as giving you instructions and guidelines your institution will almost certainly also give you an advisor or supervisor: a member of academic staff who will be on hand to guide, advise and support you. Different institutions organize supervision in different ways, but however your supervision works it will be up to you to make the most of the help and support available. Ensuring that you have an effective professional relationship with your supervisor is really important. Your advisor will certainly be very busy, and will probably not have time to chase after you asking you to rearrange meetings that you have missed. You need to seek out your advisor’s help when you need it, and always take up invitations to meetings or workshops. If you turn down your supervisor’s help when it is offered, you might find that it is not available later on when you realize that you need it but your supervisor is away at a conference in Detroit or interviewing llamas in the Atacama desert.

Right at the start of your project make sure that you have met your advisor and that you understand the ground rules for what help is available, how often it is reasonable for you to ask for a meeting, what you can expect of your advisor and what your advisor can expect of you. Most supervisors will set up a schedule of meetings for you throughout the period of the dissertation to discuss the various stages of the work. Rather like this book, the meetings may deal with topics in order: deciding on a topic, writing a proposal, doing the research, writing the report and so on. There may be supplementary workshops or classes laid on to deal with common problems or to provide extra help on issues such as statistical analysis or writing critical literature reviews. Some of these meetings may be one-to-one with just you and your supervisor, while others may be group meetings or workshops. You must attend those meetings. Prepare carefully for them: go along with your questions ready and with any problems clearly defined in your mind so that you can explain them to the supervisor and ask for help. Have a notebook with you to write down your advisor’s answers. Generally, the students who end up with the best dissertations are the students who made the most effective use of the support available to them through their advisors.

Dissertation supervision is a two-way process. It is not up to the advisor always to feed you instructions about what to do next. It is up to you to feed your advisor questions or information on which you would like feedback. The amount of help you get from your advisor will depend very much on the work that you put into the student–supervisor relationship. It’s your dissertation: you need to take the driving seat.

Don’t just wait for advice; seek out the advice that you need, when you need it.

Please remember that your supervisor is much better placed than we are to advise you about the specifics of how your institution deals with dissertations. If our advice seems to contradict something your supervisor has said, you should talk to your supervisor about that, work out what is the best thing to do for your particular project, and then follow your supervisor’s advice. We hope our book will give you lots of help, but your supervisor is best placed to know the details of your particular project and the requirements of your particular institution.

Getting help from your friends

Doing a dissertation can sometimes feel like a lonely, solitary task, but it is important to remember that lots of other students are going through exactly the same process. You are not alone in this! Your friends and classmates might not have the subject expertise or research experience of your supervisors, but they can still offer support and advice. Be careful not to mistake friendly support for expert advice, but do talk to each other about your dissertations. Share ideas, lend shoulders to cry on, encourage each other to get help from your supervisor when you need it, and motivate each other to do the best work that you can. If your friend has just been to see their supervisor, have a chat and see what they found out. Do the same for your friends when your supervisor gives you any advice.

Our friends Eric and Erica

When you are working on something like a dissertation it’s good to have friends to bounce ideas off, to share worries with, and maybe to enlist to help with fieldwork. From time to time in this book we’ll mention our friends Eric and Erica; they represent the kind of characters it is sometimes useful to have around. We’ll use Eric and Erica to throw up student perspectives or other ways of looking at what we’ve said, and if we want to refer to whoever it is that you have around to talk to, we’ll call your friends Eric and Erica too! They are universal sidekicks. If they get on your nerves, well, people can be like that. Your best bet is to listen to what everybody says, but to remember that it’s your dissertation, and that you have to make the decisions.

Eric says …

You need all the help you can get!

Dissertations: what this book is all about

Most undergraduate courses in geography and related disciplines include a dissertation as part of the assessment. The precise nature of the dissertation varies a little among institutions (Chapter 2) but the basic requirements are much the same wherever you are studying. Essentially the dissertation is a project of your own. You do some research and you present a report of that research. Your research, as presented in the report, is assessed.

Whether you think of yourself as an arts, humanities, science or social science student, and whether your dissertation deals with a broad geographic topic or something very specific within human geography, physical geography or environmental geography, the same basic issues apply to your work. A dissertation involves investigation, understanding and communication, and your work and your report should be an exercise in the virtues of organization, precision and clarity. Whether you are doing a qualitative or a quantitative study, whether you are using a geologica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface to the third edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is a (good) dissertation and why do I have to do one?
• 3 When should I start and how long will it take?
• 4 What shall I do it on?
• 5 Research design 1: what approach should I take?
• 6 Research design 2: exactly how should I do this project?
• 7 What kind(s) of data do I need and how do I get them?
• 8 What amount of data do I need, and what can I do with my data?
• 9 How should I write up my dissertation?
• 10 Help! It’s all gone horribly wrong. What can I do?
• 11 How will it be marked?
• 12 A final word
• References
• Index