This guide aims to help you, the Masters student, to get going properly with your Dissertation. It is aimed at students of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, but a lot of the advise can be applied generically at any level, department etc.
Lets start with a disclaimer: This guide is not perfect, last year I did my own dissertation and felt there could be more support out there which is why I made this guide. As I work as a librarian for the University of Sheffield it will contain practical pointers specifically for this Library Service, but if you are at another University I am sure your Library will be more than happy to help out! I also work as a Research Assistant at this University, which gives me a growing knowledge of Research Methods (One hopes!).
Getting Going
Your primary concern is to choose a topic that interest you, and gosh, there are many of those, or maybe there are not. You might worry tremendously about your topic, but really, all you need to worry about is whether it is something that truly interests you. After three months of hard work you will be grateful for having chosen something you wanted to do, rather than something you thought might be better for your career or because you wanted to do a dissertation with a specific lecturer. I assume you are doing a Masters because you are interested in the topic, if you came in with a certain idea about what you wanted to achieve, the dissertation is the ideal time to capitalise on that.
Talk to lecturers about it, they are researchers as well as teachers and have experience in the field you are studying. If you like Web 2.0 go talk to the lecturer that taught you about it, if you are interested in Knowledge Management go for that appropriate lecturer. Tell them about your ideas, conceptualise them and get something down on paper, even if it is only one A4.
Got the idea, what next?
Once you have the general concept it is time to start thinking about ways to move forward. This is a good moment to start reading on your topic. If you did a module on it, or are doing one on it now, go through the reading lists. At the UoS they are available through Muse (provided your lecturer put them up). Frequently you will be able to work out which authors are important in the field, based on this list. For example when you talk about the Internet, you have to read Manuel Castells “The Internet Galaxy” (1999), which is generally accepted as one of those seminal works about the impact of the Internet on our lives.
Start reading Journal Articles on the topic, ask your lecturer for advise on which articles to read, or alternatively go to the Library and ask your Subject Librarian for their advise. There is also an excellent Library Guide available for your department which contains further links to the various sources appropriate for your field.
The reason you should read Journal Articles is because they reveal potential ways of doing research. If you read Qualitative and Quantitative (more on this later) papers you will discover which type suits you best. You will also get an idea of how to structure your dissertation, this is actually very valuable. It would pay off if you sat down and analysed the structure of a (number of) previous dissertation(s) or paper(s), just so that you get a feeling for the way Academic Literature is structured.
Method: Aaaargh!
Choosing how you go about your research is difficult. Effectively there are three options, Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Method. The ethos of Qualitative and Quantitative is fundamentally different, with Qualitative research you will generally not have a pre-conceived hypothesis that you want to test, with Quantitative research you generally will want to test what you think. I say generally because that is not always the case, but I don’t want to confuse you too much so we will leave that out of the picture. Each approach has a different set of tools to achieve the end-result, in practice students choose a method based on these tools, if you want to do a questionnaire you are likely to be doing a Quantitative study where the numbers of responses have to proof your point. If you want to do interviews, you will be taking a Qualitative approach, interviews offer open endings by default (if you design them well 
)!
Don’t be put off by either methodology. You will have a natural inclination to one type anyway, if you are assertive and chatty you will probably prefer interviews, if you are mathematically minded, good at numbers and methodological, you will probably prefer questionnaires. There are other things you can do as well though, you could choose to do Focus Groups, a full Literature Analysis, Bibliometric analysis, Surveying and so on! The key is that you choose the methodology that suits your topic and you.
To be continued!
