Business Rationale Research

Business Rationale Research
Question
Answered

Title.
Acknowledgements
Abstract (brief paragraph)
Contents & Page numbers
List of figures and tables (if required)
Introduction
Literature review
Methodology
Findings and Discussion
Conclusions
Recommendations (if appropriate)
Reflection Statement (five hundred word reflection of your learning during your undergraduate course – NOT just relating to the Project)
Bibliography (Harvard Reference)
Appendices (additional graphs and materials linked to the main report).

Brief overview of key chapters.
Introduction:
Here you should provide a clear rationale for the research. You should introduce the issues and debates within the area – calling on textbook sources but also key peer reviewed literature.
You should give a brief introduction to the case study (if you have one), identify your Research Question and Objectives and a brief overview of the chapters that follow.

Literature Review.
This purpose of this chapter is to identify:
•What is already known about the area?
•What concepts and theories are relevant?
•What research methods and strategies have been used in this area?
•Are there any controversies?
•Are there any inconsistencies in findings?
•Are there any unanswered questions?

Your review also has a number of other purposes.
•To help you to refine your research question(s) and objectives further.
•To highlight research possibilities that has been overlooked in research to date.
•To discover explicit recommendations for further research.
These can provide you with a justification for your own research question(s) and objectives.
•To help you to avoid simply repeating work that has been done already.
•As a rule of thumb, at least 80% of the sources used in this chapter should come from peer-reviewed literature.

Research Methodology:
Your research design is the general plan of how you will go about answering your research question(s).
It will specify the sources from which you intend to collect data, how you propose to collect and analyse these, discuss ethical issues and the constraints you will inevitably encounter.

Findings and Discussion:
The purpose of this chapter is to report the facts your research discovered, to interpret these results and relate the findings to the original research goals and objectives. The implications of the research should also be discussed here.

Conclusions and Recommendations:
In summing up the work you should:
1. Demonstrate that you have answered the research question(s).
2. Demonstrate that you have met the research objectives.
3. Consider your findings in relation to the existing literature.
4. Reflect on any implications for future research.
5. Recommendations should be insightful and show clearly how your work leads to them.