Many UK universities are initiating students’ thesis or proposal writing guidance. However, a lot of international students often make empty choices when choosing a topic, which prevents them from making large-scale revisions at a later stage, and may even affect the quality of the whole thesis. In this article, we will introduce how to follow the three steps of Key Process A, B, and C to confirm the stability during the research period as well as the rational use of information resources.
Step 1: A – Identify the research subjects and their interrelationships
This step focuses on identifying the main subjects of your research and their interrelationships. For example, if your research subject is consumers and their shopping habits, you need to consider factors such as live sales, nationality, region, and social media platforms. Also, you can further define your research by hypothesising, for example, how certain variables in live sales affect consumer shopping habits.
Step 2: B – Validate your research theory and methodology against the selected research methodology
This section highlights whether interpretivist or positivist research thinking and which qualitative or quantitative research methodology to utilise to underpin your body of theory. It is also important to test the appropriateness of your chosen research methodology. For example, when conducting face-to-face interviews, open-ended questionnaires, focus group discussions, ethnographies, or reviews, you need to make sure that your research population is broad enough. And when conducting questionnaires and secondary data collection, you also need to consider how this data will be used to support your research topic.
Step 3: C – Referencing the literature, verifying research gaps and finalising the questionnaire design
In this step, you will need to conduct a literature review and research similar but different topics in order to identify research gaps. In this process, you can use Armstrong’s model to split the questions to find out the factors affecting shopping intention, such as live streaming and consumer behaviour, consumer satisfaction and shopping intention, etc., and then refer to the relevant information to ask questions related to your research topic.
Once the above steps are completed, you can roughly determine whether your research topic can be carried out. You can take TikTok British District as your research subject and combine qualitative and quantitative research methods to explore the path of live social media marketing characteristics on consumer willingness. At this point, it’s time to start working on the framework of your dissertation, outlining detailed and accurate content!
