At this stage, the primary research phase, you will have most porbably written up the literature review of your dissertation, methodology, a draft introduction and also recognized that you are ready to complete the different parts of the primary data collection stage. You will want to understand that there are many different processes in this stage and many student prefer to do them in a number of different ways.

You will want to understand that this stage will be linked to the different parts of whether you have chosen to conduct a qualitative or quantitative research project. Some students prefer to move back home to complete this phase of their work, but I would advise against this, as you will experience a considerable more amount of distractions and thus not be able to concentrate and work intensively on your dissertation research project. You will want to make sure that you are moving towards a point where you are able to conduct the research with ease and also compile the data that you have collected. You will not want to include the different things that will mean you will be devoting less time to this process, as you could find you missing a few important points in the data that mean the difference between an ok dissertation report and an exceptional dissertation report.

When you are conducting the primary research data collection stage of your dissertation, you should also be aware to keep impeccable notes on what you have completed. You will want to ensure you have understood what you have done, but more importantly that you haven’t forgotten anything. Remembering to be an ethical researcher and to understand the different parts of ethical research will mean that the participants of your study will be happy. Make sure they know that they can have access to the outcomes of your dissertation, but that you will need to understand the different pieces of information given to you are confidential, so you may not be able to supply everything to them and just the final overview in the dissertation paper.

Also, when you are conducting the actual research data collection, with whichever methods you have chosen, you should, if using focus groups or interviews, record the different sessions that you have. This will mean that you don’t really have to make notes and can thus concentrate on the different aspects of the responses and these responses leading to further questions and questions of clarification. This will help you gain an overall picture and understanding and thus lead to better and more revealing research – remember that a good academic researcher will always dig down and search for the answers to any initial answers that are given. Needless to say that you should ensure the other person’s permission has been sought before you actually record anything.

Following a few simple steps will mean that you can develop your analysis of the primary research material and form better and more complex conclusions for your dissertation.

Other Tips:

1. Step 2 – Dissertation Research When I am referring to the dissertation research stage of your dissertation, I am referring to the secondary research material that you will use to form the foundations of the actual dissertation research that you will be conducting. Yes, you may be reading this and you will be wanting more information on a library-based dissertation, but, [...]...
2. Step 8 – Presenting Dissertation Results & Discussion When it comes to the point of presenting your dissertation results and discussing them you may be a little confused how to do this and so many of us are when we first do it. You should prepare what you want to look over in this chapter and more significantly, what you want to [...]...
3. Step 6 – Dissertation Methodology This stage of the whole research process will be significant to the rest of your dissertation paper as whole. You will want to understand what the different methods are for research collection, such as questionnaires, surveys, interviews and focus groups to name just a few. Some of these types of data collection methods [...]...
4. Step 5 – Conduct a Dissertation Literature Review When you are looking at the different stages of writing your dissertation, you will see that a number of guides look at the different stages of your literature search and review. This will be the point that you might actually get confused, as you will be looking at the information you are reading and [...]...
5. Step 4 – Scheduling Your Dissertation Work You will need to be clear about your dissertation and how you will go about the different parts. You want to be clear that you will complete all of the necessary and different tasks that you have, but you really don’t want to be confused about what you need to do and when as [...]...