Steps Involved In Dissertation Secondary Research

The research methodology plays an important role in dissertation writing. Many students choose to base their dissertation on secondary research. This means they rely on data that has been collected by someone else or in other words, the past data for a research topic. But, then how can someone proceed with their dissertation? We have gathered some useful tips from top dissertation consultants? 

1. Develop Research Questions 

The first step is to know what is the agenda of your research. Hence, you must come up with some research questions or objectives. So first pick up an area of your interest, gather literature present about it and start digging. You will find some knowledge gaps. Those are your potential research questions. 

2. Identification of Secondary Data 

Now, that you know what you have to ‘research’ about, you can now easily gather data about it. You can check online dissertation portals, journals, magazines, online libraries etc. and discover the past data. This is an advantage as you will be able to find large data for your dissertation. All the data will be professionally collected so you can rely upon it. 

3. Evaluation of Secondary Data 

There can be cases when your secondary data would not exactly fit into your research requirements. The data might also be invalid so one needs to evaluate it. See who collected this data and why, what methodology they used to collect that data, and when was that data collected. Then see whether everything matches your requirements or not. 

Prepare your Secondary Data 

Out of the data that you have selected, you need to prepare the data that you can put into your dissertation. For that, you need to evaluate the data that you have collected. Look for missing values, all the data variables that are important for your dissertation and hence finalise your data. You can seek help from professional proofreading experts to enhance the quality of your data evaluation. 

4. Create an Outline for Dissertation  

Decide what chapters will be in your dissertation and create a structure of your dissertation. You must decide the subchapters or different headings that you will mention and where you will use the data that you have collected. 

Where to find Secondary Data for your Dissertation 

Secondary data can be found from various resources, both internal and external. Internal sources that can be used to find secondary data are customer data, sales data, marketing data and external sources that can be used to find secondary data are national institutions, government websites and journals. 

Preparing a dissertation with secondary data is not that hard. In fact, it is far easier than using primary data as you do not have to collect data on your own. You won’t be conducting any surveys, inviting participants and investing time in finding the right data for you. Just follow these simple steps that are stated above and your dissertation will be ready without any hustle!