You need to deliver a research plan for a research project of your choice. If you are doing your autumn project or your master’s thesis, you can preferably make the research plan for that. If you are not doing an autumn project or master’s thesis you can chose a research project of your own. (If you chose your own research project please talk to the course teacher so we make sure the complexity of the research project is adequate.) Also, remember that if you already have taken IT3010 you cannot take this course.
A template for research projects can be found here and is based on the six Ps from the book. The plan should be maximum 3 pages and maximum 1200 words excluding the front page but including all figures, tables and references to literature. Note: the template has a front page and some explanatory text in each section. These are not part of the three pages! Remove all the explanatory text in each section before delivering. (but leave the front page).
The research plan will be evaluated based on the following criteria:
- Purpose: You should convince the reader about the purpose of your project by motivating and referring to existing literature that support your thesis/hypothesis. You should also clarify your research questions justified by the purpose. (35%)
- Contributions: You should demonstrate that you have a clear understanding of what new knowledge or other new products, processes, models, theories etc. you add to the existing knowledge. Important to show that your contribution is new (20%)
- Research method: You need to show and convince your reader about the decisions you have made regarding research strategy and data generation methods. Strategy and data generation methods are related to your research questions as shown in Figure 3.1 in the book. You can of course have other strategies and data generation methods (the books gives only a number of examples) as long as you justify your decisions. (20%)
- Participants: If you plan to evaluate your thesis with users you need to describe this. Any other dependency on people or resources (e.g. experts you need to interview, data sets you need access to) needs to be written here. (10%)
- Research paradigm: You should read the related chapters in the book and try to describe what paradigm you are in, positivist, interpretivism or critical research. Discuss this with your supervisor. (10%)
- Final deliverable and dissemination: Will this be a report, a video, a demonstration, presentation etc.? How do you justify the presentation form you have chosen? (5%)
Delivery date: See Administrative information page. Send me a PDF copy of your plan by email.
I have started to collect some examples of research plans that have received (almost) full score in earlier years. You can find them here: