MSc Research Phase Handbook 2025-26 | University of Salford, Manchester

MSc Research Phase Handbook

Introduction

Research Phase Overview

The “Research Phase” of your programme is the final 60 credits of the programme.

For full-time (“FT”) students, the Research Phase is one trimester long, and for part-time (“PT”) or distance learning (“DL”) students, the Research Phase is two trimesters long.

Completion of the first assessment, the Research Proposal, will help you to refine your research focus and to make a justified selection of your chosen research pathway. The second assessment, the Dissertation, is where you additionally record and implement your research plan and produce your final work.

The Research Proposal

Research Proposal Assignment

Brief Assignment Title: Research Proposal

Submission Deadline: Refer to Section 1.5

This assessment constitutes 25% of the marks for the 60 Credit Dissertation

The stated Aims of this element of the module are to provide an opportunity for students to:

• Engage in good research planning at the postgraduate level;

Intended Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

On successful completion, the student will be able to:

• Develop and refine effective research aims and objectives based on a detailed analysis and review of alternative research strategies and research techniques, applying appropriate selection criteria to reach a justified and justifiable selection of research approach

Key Skills and other attributes

On completion, the student will have had the opportunity to:

• Demonstrate what makes good, ethically conducted research.
• Use a variety of techniques and/or sources to investigate research issues;
• Critically analyse information in a variety of ways and develop justifiable, evidence-based conclusions;
• Demonstrate high-level written communication skills;

Assignment Task

You should submit to Turnitin a SINGLE-word compatible document which incorporates both of the following elements:

A research proposal of 3,000 words that provides an overview of a piece of research that you would wish to undertake for your dissertation. The requirements as to structure and content are set out below in Section 2.2  ‘Developing Your Research Proposal’

Assessment Criteria

Your proposal will be assessed against the criteria set out in the table below. You will note that these criteria are organised into groups, and a mark weighting is applied. Evidently, if your Research Proposal fails to address one (or more) of the groups of criteria, you will receive no marks for the group(s) you have missed. This can have a very serious impact on the overall mark you receive, so make sure you address every criterion in your submission. This should be straightforward; simply ensure that your proposal follows the structure set out in Section 2.2 ‘Developing Your Research Proposal’.

Grade descriptors

Submissions will be assessed in the context of the Aims and Intended Learning Outcomes set out above, with the following criteria being taken into consideration:

Submission Requirements

You must submit your single-word compatible document through dedicated Blackboard submission links.

The University uses an electronic plagiarism detection tool service called Turnitin®, which is hosted by iParadigms (a US company). The University has been using the Turnitin® service for all assessments that students are required to submit by electronic means starting in the academic year 2010/2011. By registering with the University, you consent to the following:

a) The University will submit your assessments (including details of your name and course details) to the Turnitin® service so that your assessments can be compared with the database of submissions that is maintained by the Turnitin® service and that is drawn from various sources, including the internet; and

b) Your assessments may be stored in that database of submissions indefinitely (or until the University stops using the Turnitin® service and requests their deletion) to help protect your assessments from future plagiarism. Where there is a match between content in your assessments and content in other submissions, then your assessments may also be copied by the University and other users of the Turnitin® service to allow closer analysis.

Important Notes: Submission links are set on the BB module space. Please submit your research proposal and dissertation to the designated submission links.

In case you miss your submission due times: 1) If you submit within one week late, please submit your work to the original submission links you are meant to use (if you have RAP in place, this rule goes a week further); 2) If you submit more than one week late, please submit your work to the RESIT (Reassessment) submission links (most likely you have an accepted non-submission PMC which allows you to submit at a later date, RESIT (Reassessment) link is where your work needs to be submitted).

Whether you will be resitting the whole module or an individual component depends on the module's combined outcome from the research proposal and dissertation (details please see section 5, page 34)

Research Proposal Feedback Arrangements

Written feedback on the Research Proposal will be provided via Blackboard, through a feedback form attached to your research proposal submission. We will aim to provide provisional marks and feedback within 15 working days of the assessment date, or your submission date in case you submit late.

To access your feedback form, please go to the dissertation module space, under Grades, follow your submission, and the feedback form will be attached to your submission along with the ‘Overall Feedback’ section.

Dissertation

Dissertation Brief

Modules: PGT Dissertation Assignment Title: Dissertation
Submission Deadline: See Section 1.5 above and paragraphs 11 and 12 of Section 3.7 

This assessment constitutes 75% of the marks for the 60 Credit Dissertation

Aims of the Module

The stated aims of this module are to provide an opportunity for students to:

• Engage in good research planning at the postgraduate level;
• Apply an established process of research to produce a research proposal followed by a dissertation on a specific research topic related to the programme of study;
• Engage in empirical, theoretical or doctrinal research (based on evidence present in the literature) or constructive research (aimed at solving a real-life problem), or other type of recognised research approach;
• Apply an ethical approach when conducting research and complete the ethical approval process in accordance with university requirements.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and Understanding

On successful completion, the student will be able to:

• Develop and refine effective research aims and objectives based on a detailed analysis and review of alternative research strategies and research techniques, applying appropriate selection criteria to reach a justified and justifiable selection of research approach;
• Conduct extensive literature search culminating in the analysis and synthesis of complex information derived from that search;
• Effectively and robustly implement the selected research approach to identify and critically analyse relevant data.
• Design and develop conclusions based on evidence, including validation and authentication;
• Produce a sustained, sophisticated, and logical argument in the form of a dissertation. 

Key Skills and other attributes

On completion, the student will have had the opportunity to:

• Demonstrate what makes good, ethically conducted research;
• Use a variety of techniques and/or sources to investigate research issues;
• Critically analyse information in a variety of manners and develop justifiable, evidence-based conclusions;
• Use evidence in such a manner as to provide for stable and justifiable conclusions;
• Demonstrate high-level written communication skills;

This assignment has been designed to support your learning in the context of these aims and intended learning outcomes.

Assignment Task

Develop a Dissertation of between 15,000 and 18,000 words (this word count includes everything in the submitted document, such as title page, TOC, references, and appendices if there are any), which implements the research plan that you developed in your Research Proposal assignment. Dissertations, which significantly exceed or fall short of this target length, are unlikely to satisfy the assessment criteria and will accordingly incur a penalty.

The Dissertation must meet the Assessment Criteria set out in the matrix at Section 3.6. Details of how the dissertation must be formatted and submitted are set out in Section 3.7 below.

Development of your Dissertation

A dissertation is an extended piece of academic writing, which seeks to supply an answer to a research question, to establish a research aim, or to establish the validity of a research hypothesis. For most students, the dissertation will be the fully executed research project that was originally sketched out in the Research Proposal. For that reason, many students will inevitably wish to use parts of their Research Proposal again within their Dissertation, and that is perfectly acceptable. The ban against self-plagiarism, which applies to all other types of academic work, is specifically excluded in the case of a Research Proposal, as the whole point of a Research Proposal is that it should form the basis and guide for the completed research project.

So what does a Dissertation look like? Although we are very prescriptive about the content and structure of the Research Proposal, the Dissertation is a different animal. Its structure will be determined by the type of research that is being done, and it is here that students should work with their supervisors in order to agree on an appropriate structure to achieve the research purpose. For that reason, we do not mandate a format or a structure. A few points can, however, usefully be made which students might find of assistance.

Dissertation based on empirical evidence (Primary Research)

This is perhaps the “classic” School of the Built Environment dissertation. Whatever else might be its challenges, conceptually, it is a really easy thing to grasp and to structure sensibly.

The first thing that needs to be done is to contextualise the research topic. Some people do this with a general introduction to the area to justify its relevance, before introducing the Aim and the Objectives. Others start with the Aim and Objectives and then do a short contextualisation. There is no perfect or only way. You need to get your research topic established clearly and persuasively somehow.

What then happens is a critical review of the relevant academic literature. This needs to be a thoughtful review of good literature. You need to draw out themes, to identify problems, to demonstrate philosophical conflicts. You must do this effectively, in your own words, drawing on good, properly referenced sources. At the end, it’s often effective to summarise where you have ended up. You might, for example, establish the precise questions or general themes you want to explore in your empirical phase.

Then typically comes the research methods section, where you establish the appropriate research strategy and technique. If your Research Proposal was effective, you may be able to draw heavily on that here, though if it was weak, you will probably need to do more work on it. This section is all written as though you haven’t done the research yet. You’ll need to explain what data you are going to acquire and how you are going to analyse any data you acquire. You’ll also need to mention how you will take care of the ethics of research (this bit will be really easy, because by this point, you will already have secured ethical approval).

Next comes the presentation of the data, followed by the analysis. You need to think carefully about how you present your data. There has to be a balance between providing too much and too little data. If you use graphs, etc., then they need to be easy to read and tell the reader the right things. You may choose to put some data in Appendices, but you must not rely on a reader looking at anything in an Appendix to make your arguments. An Appendix is only there as an opportunity for further reading, not for making your point.

In terms of data analysis, you must have a clear plan of attack, based on your research methods section. You have to demonstrate an accepted method of analysing data, whether that be qualitative or quantitative, or both.

You will then have a Discussion Section, which takes your findings and challenges these in the context of the literature review. This Discussion Section can be a chapter in its own right, and it can be the first section within the conclusion. Either way, it should be suitably comprehensive and interrogative.

Finally, you set out your conclusions. There should be no new material in the Conclusions section (because it is a conclusion, not a continuation of your analysis). You need to make sure you reflect on your Aim and Objectives, and demonstrate how you have achieved them.

The whole work should be a single, well-argued, clear piece of persuasive academic writing.

Dissertation Based on Literature/Sources/Data (Secondary Research)

Many of the same points made in respect of the primary research dissertation apply just as well to a secondary research dissertation. You need to make a single clear argument from start to finish. You must have a well-defined central theme. Probably that will be based on an Aim and Objectives.

Where things can become conceptually more tangled is in respect of the “literature review”. In secondary research, there are two differing approaches. Either you are using literature itself to develop a line of reasoning, or you are using the data/information produced by others and reanalysing that data for your own purposes.

The first approach is a desktop study where the only data you are using will be literature produced by others; arguably, the whole dissertation is a literature review, and that is why a particular challenge of this type of dissertation is to maintain a clear and persuasive line of reasoning throughout the whole work. Where empirical dissertations cause students headaches owing to the practical fact of getting hold of data from participants, literature-based dissertations cause headaches because students get lost and don’t really understand how to maintain a strong line of reasoning.

There are a number of ways to try to get over this hurdle. One thing that some students do is to bring the research methodology section forward, so that it is placed just after the introduction. This permits the student to determine the different nature of the successive parts of the dissertation. One section will, for example, like with the empirical research dissertation, explore the problematic areas in the literature, and justify the problem being researched, and the aspects that will be looked at. Successive sections will then address the various elements of the research Aim identified earlier.

An additional conceptual difficulty in relation to literature-based dissertations is how analysis is managed. In empirical work, the analysis is very easy to identify; it’s what you do with the data you have collected. A similar approach is sometimes adopted in respect of literature-based dissertations. For example, a rigid process of gathering and then sorting/processing/interpreting from the literature may be imposed on that material. However, that is only one approach, and other approaches can be just as valid, in appropriate circumstances. What students need to do is to set out the manner in which they are proposing to carry out the analysis, and to make it clear to the reader throughout how that analysis is being carried out.

The other approach to secondary research is to reuse existing data collected by other people. This follows very much the same dissertation approach as that of empirical research very much, except that you have saved yourself the time and expense of collecting the data yourself. There will be a clear distinction between the literature review section (theory) and the analysis of the secondary material (data). The secondary material you wish to use in your study may be the actual raw data collected by other people, or a summary/reduction of data collected by others. In secondary research, it is important to know why and how people collected the data, and if it has been summarised, then the categories they used to create the summary. The main concern in secondary data research is to ensure that the data you have is “fit for purpose” to address the research question you are asking. Unlike empirical research, you cannot shape what data is collected to match exactly your research question; in secondary research, you hope that the fit of the previously collected data is close enough for your research purpose.

Just as in relation to empirical research-based dissertations, there should be no new material introduced in the conclusion of a secondary research-based dissertation.

Dissertation Assessment Criteria and Grade Descriptors

Dissertation Submission Requirements

You must submit your single-word compatible document through the dedicated Blackboard submission links

The University uses an electronic plagiarism detection tool service called Turnitin®, which is hosted by iParadigms (a US company). The University has been using the Turnitin® service for all assessments that students are required to submit by electronic means starting in the academic year 2010/2011. By registering with the University, you consent to the following:

a) The University will submit your assessments (including details of your name and course details) to the Turnitin® service so that your assessments can be compared with the database of works that is maintained by the Turnitin® service and that is drawn from various sources, including the internet; and

b) Your assessments may be stored in that database of works indefinitely (or until the University stops using the Turnitin® service and requests their deletion) to help protect your assessments from future plagiarism. Where there is a match between content in your assessments and content in other works, then your assessments may also be copied by the University and other users of the Turnitin® service to allow closer analysis.

Important Notes: Submission links are set on the BB module space, under two different folders: One for the Research Proposal and one for the Dissertation. Please submit your research proposal/dissertation to the designated submission links; your submission could be missed if submitted to the wrong submission link, which will result in a delay in marking.

In case you miss your submission due times: 1) If you submit within one week late, please submit your work to the original submission links you are meant to use (if you have RAP in place, this rule goes a week further); 2) If you submit more than one week late, please submit your work to the RESIT (Reassessment) submission links (most likely you have an accepted non-submission PMC which allows you to submit at a later date, RESIT (Reassessment) link is where your work needs to be submitted).

Whether you will be resitting the module or an individual component depends on the module combined outcome from the research proposal and dissertation (details please see section 5)

Dissertation Assessment Criteria and Grade Descriptors