Your research project for level 3

Read the following guidelines to find out how to carry out your research project in this level and suggest possible topics you could work on. Post your proposals and the names of your team members.

§  Introduction

In this section, let the reader know in a few sentences what your project will be addressing. State at the outset what you are interested in researching and why. Explain how the topic of your project is related to your studies, including an explanation of how the project makes use of the knowledge you gained from your Bachelor’s Degree in Tourism.

Clearly state your research problem and break it down into a series of more specific research questions, or, whenever feasible, into hypotheses. Be sure to indicate the process by which you have arrived at the predictions you make so that you can justify your hypotheses. Hypotheses, as a rule, flow from a logical process that includes consideration of what previous research has, or has not, demonstrated.

§  Literature review

Indicate which studies have already been done on the same or related topics; which questions or hypotheses have been offered; major findings; consistencies and inconsistencies among these findings. Appropriate citations would include recent peer-reviewed articles published in regionally, nationally, or internationally recognised professional journals; books; monographs; etc.

After reviewing the literature, place your own research within a context of already existing knowledge. Is your research an attempt to retest previous research findings? Investigating some aspect(s) of previous research in greater depth? Exploring areas suggested by previous findings? Studying a problem about which little or nothing is known, but which needs to be investigated for practical or theoretical reasons?

§  Methodology

Identify your research approach (quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods) and type according to its reach (exploratory, descriptive, causal/correlational or explicative), purpose (basic or applied), design (experimental or non-experimental) and/or information sources (documentary or field research).

Specify the universe and the sample -who the subjects of your research will be and how you are going to select them. Give your reasons for choosing such a sample, bearing in mind that you should find at least 50 respondents.

Identify your procedure. Indicate which data collection tools you plan to use in addition to surveys (observation, interviews, focus group, etc.), and any relevant information about your research design. Finally, discuss how you intend to process and analyse your data.

§  Results

In this section, the research outcomes should be interpreted and presented without comments, in a balanced way. Appropriate charts and graphs should be presented either in this section or in the appendices.

§  Conclusion

This section essentially returns to section one and should present how this study answers its research questions and how it fills the knowledge gap presented in section two. This section should reveal how the results of this study match or do not match other similar research. Great care should be taken to discuss why this study is important and how the results can be used. There should be a large number of citations to aspects that have been previously mentioned in other sections of the study. There should also be a reference to the limitations of the study (e.g. unexpected challenges, constraints on generalisability, applications to practice, and/or utility of findings) and what future research ought to be undertaken.