NBS8300 Dissertation Guidelines Pdf | Newcastle University

Contents

1 Beginning the dissertation
1.1 The dissertation in your programme of study.
1.2 Some readings (also see research methods module reading lists)
1.3 Goals for Postgraduate Dissertations.
1.4 Empirical material.
1.5 The Literature Review
1.6 Method
1.7 Ethical Issues, risk assessment, and GDPR
1.8 Sources for Topic Ideas.
1.9 Guidelines for suitable topics.
1.10 Writing your Full Dissertation Proposal.
1.11 Submission deadline for Research Methods Assignment 2 – Full Dissertation Proposal    13
1.12 Submission of final dissertation
1.13 Penalties for late submission

2 Assessment Criteria.
2.1. The scope of assessment.
2.2 How your work is marked
2.3 Presentation and format
2.4 General points

3. Citation and referencing
3.1 Plagiarism
3.2 Referencing
3.3 Definitions.
3.4 Why write references?
3.5 Harvard Referencing System

4. Student’s responsibilities
4.1 Meeting Guidelines in this Manual.
4.2 Selection of Topic.
4.3 Contact with Dissertation supervisor
4.4 Managing the Dissertation Supervision Sessions.
4.5 Meeting Deadlines.
4.6 Originality
4.7 Referencing

Appendix A
NUBS Ethical approval form for student projects.
Risk Assessment
Risk Assessment form – No travel outside University.
Newcastle University Travel Risk Assessment
GDPR DATA MANAGEMENT ASSESSMENT

Appendix B (example Contents page)

Appendix C –  The Cite Them Right Harvard Referencing System

1 Beginning the dissertation

1.1 The dissertation in your programme of study

The words “Dissertation” and “research” can seem quite daunting. However, most of you will have completed some sort of project during your previous education, and, in many ways, a dissertation is just an extension of individual project work.

The key differences are:

1. You choose your own question/problem/issue – preferably one in which you are interested and/or engaged in some way.
2. You must review the relevant academic literature and explore the methodological issues in your project area.

The dissertation forms a major part of your Master’s programme, counting for 60 out of the total 180 credits (or up to 33% of your Master’s degree). Strictly speaking, students are only entitled to ‘proceed’ to the dissertation once they have successfully passed the teaching component of the programme. However, in practice work on the dissertation begins earlier in the academic year. You undertake postgraduate research methods training (NBS8372) as a preparation for the dissertation work and will prepare an initial/developed research proposal for your dissertation as part of that module.

These guidelines are intended to help you in the dissertation process. Given that a dissertation is an individual piece of work there is no intention unduly to restrict you in your approach. This document presents guidelines to support your work, therefore, and is not a set of absolute rules or procedures to which you must adhere. You will talk in more detail about your own project with your dissertation supervisor. Nonetheless, it has been carefully prepared and you should read it to understand the important aspects of the dissertation process, as well as the standards required within the Business School.

In accordance with the module guidelines (NBS8300) for the OLSCM dissertations, students on these programmes may choose to have a more explicit practice-orientation for their research project. In all cases, however, the research project will always include a critical review of the relevant academic literature and will explore the methodological issues in the project area.

1.2 Some readings (for more, see research methods module reading lists)

Bryman, A. and Bell, E. (2011) Business Research Methods, 3rd Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Saunders M, Lewis, P. and Thornhill, A. (2009) Research Methods for Business Students, 5th Edition (Prentice Hall).

Easterby-Smith, M., Thorpe, R. and Jackson, P. (2012) Management Research, 4th Edition, (Sage: Sage Series in Management Research)

Collis, J. and Hussey, R. (2009) Business Research, 3rd  Edition, (Palgrave)

Alvesson, M. and Deetz, S. (2000) Doing Critical Management Research
(Sage: Sage Series in Management Research) Silverman, D. (2013) Doing Qualitative Research, (Sage)
Silverman, David (2011) Interpreting Qualitative Data, 4th Edition (Sage)

Yin, R. K. (2014) Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 5th Edition, (Sage: Sage series in Applied Social Research Methods)

1.3 Goals for Postgraduate Dissertations

The primary goal of the dissertation is to allow you to integrate your academic study with the analysis of some material, preferably empirical.

More specifically, dissertations should:

1.Be based on either:

1. Empirical work undertaken by the student; And/Or
2. A very in-depth review of current academic theoretical work;

2.Provide an academic framework within which that empirical or theoretical work is evaluated;

3.Include a discussion of appropriate research methods issues;

4.Arrive at a conclusion justified by the empirical and/or theoretical material.
Putting this in a different way, your research may be:

• Descriptive – describing the features of a setting or a case, or the views of a group or individual; And/Or
• Explanatory – testing or attempting to derive a theory or model. 
  Your research methods may be:
• Qualitative (e.g. observation, interpretation of interviews); And/Or
• Quantitative (e.g. survey or experimental).

1.4 Empirical material

This may include any one or more of the following:

• Financial, economic and statistical information (e.g. from Datastream, Labour Force Survey, Household Survey, etc);
• The results of questionnaire surveys you have conducted yourself;
• Interviews or Focus Groups you have conducted;
• Participant observation of an organisation – e.g. a place of part-time work; a voluntary group or an organisation for which you have previously worked;
• Non-participant observation (also known as ethnography) of an organisation to which you can gain regular and reasonably extended access – e.g. a company where a friend or family member works;
• Written or multimedia documents whose independent existence can be verified
  oNewspaper articles; Film, Television, Radio, Videos;
  oOfficial records and reports from companies, trade unions, professional associations, voluntary bodies, local & national government, independent research units and ‘think tanks’, industry forums & trade associations;
  oConfidential documents internal to an organisation – be very careful of the confidentiality and ethical issues
  oPublished diaries, biographies & autobiographies, histories of companies, industries or other relevant organisations;
  oArchived correspondence;
  oThe archived content of an internet discussion forum;
  oHistorical academic literature (generally over 15 years old).

In rare circumstances it may be feasible (but only with the full agreement of your dissertation supervisor) to conduct a totally theoretical dissertation – for instance on the philosophy of Business Ethics or the social theory of organisational analysis.  Even with this type of dissertation, it is usually wiser to relate relevant theoretical argument to empirical or practical issues, such as current debates on corporate governance or research methods.

Whatever data are collected (e.g. interview recordings; completed questionnaires etc.), along with the data analysis outputs (e.g. interview transcripts/coding schemes; database files etc.), these should be kept securely in case they need to be made available to the marking team. Further, if these are electronic, you should ensure they are securely backed-up.

1.5 The Literature Review

The literature review should be a separate chapter. It should review the relevant literature in order to provide a framework within which your empirical material can be evaluated. It should be succinct (i.e. you should not attempt to describe a whole body of literature in detail, but focus on those areas which are relevant to your research aims and questions) and should link directly to your own investigation. Be critical in your approach: be clear about areas of disagreement, in terms of views or research findings. Attend the relevant library sessions on the Research Methods course and make good use of the library resources available.

A good literature review does more than simply restate the literature. You need to consider the difference between a literature report and a literature review. A report of the literature simply describes what theoretical and empirical work exists in the topic area under discussion, summarising perhaps but not adding analysis or commentary. A literature review goes much further. It discusses theoretical and empirical work thematically, bringing out inconsistencies and controversies and relates your detailed research questions to that discussion. Ideally a literature review will develop an argument that justifies your research question/issue/problem.

1.6 Method

If you have formulated your research question/issue/problem fully, then it may already suggest a particular approach to the design of the research project. In any case, in selecting a method you must ensure that it is appropriate to your research question. This chapter should first describe and briefly justify your overall research strategy, with reference to the research methods literature. The specific data collection methods you employ – surveys, interviews, observation, analytical models should clearly fit within the overall methodology. For instance, it would be inappropriate to adopt a qualitative interpretive methodology and then rely mainly on quantitative tools or SWOT analyses. You should clearly describe and justify the methods and tools you employ. Where there are constraints on the kind of investigation that you can conduct, you should acknowledge them. You should include samples of the data collection instruments you have used (e.g. copies of your questionnaire) in the appendices, where appropriate.

1.7 Ethical Issues, risk assessment, and GDPR

You are required to comply with the Newcastle University Code of Good Practice in Research.

Prior to commencing your dissertation, you are required to consider the Newcastle University Ethical Approval Process for Research, the School’s Fieldwork & Travel Risk Assessment, and GDPR regulations (3 forms in total). Further details can be found in Appendix A, where you will find the appropriate forms and guidance. It is essential that you complete the forms and submit them with your full research proposal as appendices (assignment 2 on NBS8372 Research Methods module) by uploading them via Canvas. Your dissertation supervisor will then consider the forms for approval (clearly indicating if they give approval or if they are passing it to the Ethics Convenor for further consideration). You cannot proceed with your research (i.e., data collection) until these forms have been completed and approved. If approval is not granted by the time of the Board of Examiners (end of semester 2) you may be prevented from proceeding to semester 3 – you are responsible for ensuring that the forms are approved by your supervisor by the end of semester 2. During semester 3, you may be away from the university for short periods conducting fieldwork for example. If this is the case, you will, of course, still need to consider the university’s notice of absence and attendance monitoring procedures. As a general rule, you should treat semester 3 as a normal semester in terms of your availability even if there are no formal lectures during this period.

Please note that if you change your research design at some point after getting your original research design ethically approved, you may well need to obtain further ethical approval and fieldwork and travel risk approval, and reconsider GDPR issues in the light of the revised research design. This issue should be discussed with your supervisor as appropriate.

Within your discussion of Research Methods in the dissertation, you should show that you are aware of the ethical issues raised by the practice of writing about other people's lives. If it is appropriate, ensure that your research subjects are aware of the kinds of thing you are planning to write. If necessary, use pseudonyms and change identifying details.

2 Assessment Criteria

2.1. The scope of assessment

Ideally, your dissertation should reflect:

• A clear statement of the problem you have chosen to investigate
• A thorough reading of the relevant literature
• Appropriate selection of empirical material
• An ability to synthesise various academic perspectives
• A good grasp of the theoretical and practical issues
• A critical stance (in relation to the literature and your own research) and an ability to evaluate evidence, drawing appropriate conclusions and acknowledging ambiguity;
• A set of arguments that are logically and coherently developed
• Clarity of presentation
• A fluent style

2.2 How your work is marked

The dissertation will be double marked by your Dissertation supervisor and one other member of the teaching/research staff. Double marking means that they mark the work separately, and then come to an agreed overall mark. The Second Marker will be assigned on the basis of staff expertise and workloads. In addition, a sample of dissertations will be read by an External Examiner. Although they will not generally have the right to alter your specific mark, they will be asked to validate the overall assessment of dissertations.

In the table below are the set of criteria that will be used to mark your dissertation, so read it carefully and understand the distinctions between the marking bands.

2.3 Presentation and format

Length: The Dissertation should not exceed 12,000 words, not including references and appendices. Your Dissertation supervisor may refuse to read anything beyond this limit. On extremely rare occasions it may be appropriate to exceed this limit, but only with the full prior agreement of the Dissertation supervisor.

You must submit your Dissertation turnitin. The requirement for an electronic copy is in order for the University to easily check for plagiarism (see below).

There are no specific rules for content and presentation. Different parts of your dissertation may have a different weight depending upon, for example, the nature of your project and the availability of a background literature.

However, dissertations will normally comprise:

• A Title Page (this is essential): including the title of the dissertation, your name and degree course, and the institution awarding the degree (usually Newcastle University Business School). The title should be succinct yet clearly specify the content of the report. This should be brief, descriptive and explicit rather than poetic or implicit. Thirty (30) words is normally the maximum length. It should be agreed and finalised as part of the final draft. It may be different from the original working title.
• An Abstract (essential): stating briefly the mode of enquiry and any conclusions reached. This should be brief, certainly no more than one page in length.
• A Contents Page – (See Appendix B for an example)
• Acknowledgements: acknowledging any help, advice or support received during the dissertation process, including from people outside the Business School.
• An Introduction (essential): the purpose of this chapter is to introduce and contextualize the study. This means that the significance or importance of the topic is set out. If there is no apparent importance to the study to any external reader, the topic may not be appropriate. Personal interest may inspire selection of the project topic, but ultimately, its importance to others as a research project should be specified. This can best be done by positioning the dissertation in relation to other work that has been published, whether in agreement with that work or otherwise – in other words, you should summarise here the main points from the next chapter, the Literature Review.

This Introduction should also describe the setting in which your research was undertaken, and discuss the questions your dissertation addresses. This section should also tell the reader how the topic will be unfolded and the order of forthcoming material.

• Literature Review: See above
• Method: See above
• Results or findings: these should be clearly presented. Avoid over- burdening the reader with masses of data: produce summaries of the main findings. Depending on your method, these might take the form of appropriately headed numerical tables with descriptive accounts of their content in the text, or qualitative analyses with examples of material to enable the reader to judge the relation between those data and the conclusions drawn. Where statistical procedures are employed, these should be described. It is often useful to include samples of data, calculations and computer printouts in the appendices (appendices do not contribute to the word count).
• Discussion: this should summarise your findings, and indicate their implications for your research questions. You should discuss how your findings support or challenge the theoretical / empirical context set out in the literature review. Do not overstate your conclusions: remember that your method may be incomplete, your sample unrepresentative and your conclusions open to different interpretations by different readers. When editing your work, try to anticipate any weaknesses that a reader might find in

your discussion and acknowledge / incorporate / change what you have said to take them into account. Evaluate here any deficiencies in the way you designed the research or practical difficulties in carrying it out in the way that you intended. You may also want to discuss alternative approaches that could be employed to gather data relevant to your questions.

The Discussion chapter functions as an appraisal and criticism of your work, in relation to the issues and any hypotheses raised in the introduction. It should not simply repeat chunks from your introduction or findings.

There are of course exceptions, especially with these two main chapters on Findings and Discussion. For some styles of dissertation, for instance ethnographic, historical or case studies, it may be more appropriate to integrate the discussion with the presentation of empirical material.

• Conclusion (essential): a brief statement of any conclusions you have reached as a result of your enquiries. What do you want the reader to know as a result of having read your dissertation? How do your findings and/or discussion relate back to any broader issues you have raised in the Introduction? The conclusion may also suggest further work or study needed on the topic, as well as ways the new work can be used or applied in other cases. It is not meant to be a summary or restatement of the entire project, which belongs in the abstract. If you have developed any strong personal opinions about the subject which seem appropriate to relate, this is the place where such content is appropriate.
• References: a complete list, properly set out, with all relevant details. All references cited in the text should be included here - and vice versa. See the section later in this Guide on the Harvard Referencing System.
• Appendices: if appropriate. As a general rule, if figures, tables, charts or quotes are less than a full page and can be conveniently included in the text, you will want to do so, since reference to appendices is awkward for the reader. All such material, in the text or at the end, should be titled and sequentially numbered. Tabular material which is presented in landscape format should be bound with the top of the table to the spine. Appendices are

labelled alphabetically, although if there is little such material and it is all of a similar nature, it may all be included in one Appendix. Appendices are not included in the final word count. Equally, however, they are not included in the main marking of the dissertation. Do not put into an appendix any information, discussion or data that is essential for your argument or conclusions. Appendices are intended to support and provide additional, substantiating information for your work, not as a ‘dumping ground’ for anything that you couldn’t get into the main text because of word count restrictions. The completed ethics approval, GDPR, and risk assessment forms must be attached as appendices.

2.4 General points

Writing Style: The level of writing must be appropriate to the level of your degree. Specifically, you should pay attention to correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and clarity of style. Remember that the Second Marker (and possibly the External Examiner) will not necessarily be a specialist in your topic, so do not rely heavily on specialist language. It is your responsibility to edit the text for typing errors, even if the document is copy-typed by someone else.

Page Layout: Pages should be numbered, starting with and including the title page. This is especially important when giving draft copies of chapters to your dissertation supervisor.

Margins: Please leave sufficient margins.

Tables and charts: should be numbered in sequence by chapter, e.g. Table 3.1 is the first table in Chapter 3 Each figure should be accompanied by a descriptive title which explains the contents of the figure.

Legibility: The dissertation must be word processed. Line Spacing must be at least one-and-a-half lines and not more than double-spaced. Both the draft and final copies of the dissertation must be produced in such a manner that the text is entirely legible, and at least suitable to produce an image that a photocopier could easily reproduce.

3.Citation and referencing

3.1 Plagiarism

• The intellectual work of others that is being summarised in the dissertation must be attributed to its source. This includes material you yourself have published or submitted for assessment here or elsewhere (in the case of your assignments for NBS8372, it is possible that you will wish to develop certain parts of your proposals in your dissertation – that is fine).
• It is also plagiarism if you copy the work of another student. In that case both the plagiariser and the student who allows their work to be copied will be disciplined.
• When writing dissertations and essays, it is not sufficient to just indicate that you have used other people's work by citing them in your list of references at the end. It is also not sufficient to just put "(Bloggs 1992)" at the end of a paragraph where you have copied someone else’s words. It is essential that the paragraph itself be IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
• The only exception to this is if you are quoting a source. In that case you must put the quotation in quotation marks and cite the source, including page reference, immediately afterwards. If the quotation is longer than a sentence, you should indent and set off the whole passage; when the quotation is indented in this way it is not necessary to use quotation marks, but, as always, the author, date, and page number should be cited.
• It is assumed that all ideas, opinions, conclusions, specific wording, quotations, conceptual structure and data, whether reproduced exactly or in paraphrase, which are not referenced to another source, is the work of the student on this dissertation. If this is not the case, an act of plagiarism may have occurred, which is cause for disciplinary action at the programme or University level. IT MAY LEAD TO DISMISSAL FROM THE UNIVERSITY.

Here is a real-life example of plagiarism. We first quote an extended passage from a text-book, then a passage from a real student essay.

A quotation from Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London, Sage), p. 14 (emphasis added – some passages have been underlined to indicate where the student has plagiarised):

If from the perspectives of classical economics the object of all production is consumption, with individuals maximizing their satisfactions through purchasing from an ever-expanding range of goods, then from the perspective of some twentieth-century neo-Marxists this development is regarded as producing greater opportunities for controlled and manipulated consumption. The expansion of capitalist production, especially after the boost received from scientific management and ‘Fordism’ around the turn of the century, it is held, necessitated the construction of new markets and the 'education' of publics to become consumers through advertising and other media (Ewen, 1976). This approach, traceable back to Lukács’s (1971) Marx-Weber synthesis with his theory of reification, has been developed most prominently in the writings of Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), Marcuse (1964) and Lefebvre (1971), Horkheimer and Adorno, for example, argue that the same commodity logic and instrumental rationality manifest in the sphere of production is noticeable in the sphere of consumption. Leisure time pursuits, the arts and culture in general become filtered through the culture industry; reception becomes dictated by exchange value as the higher purposes and values of culture succumb to the logic of the production process and the market...

Student essay:

From the perspective of some twentieth century neo-Marxists these developments produce greater opportunities for controlled and manipulated consumption. On the one hand critical theorists from the Frankfurt school stress that the same commodity logic and instrumental rationality manifested in the sphere of production is also noticeable in the sphere of consumption. Leisure time pursuits- the arts and culture become filtered through the 'culture industry': the mass media and popular culture. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979). Reception becomes dictated by exchange value as the higher purposes and values of culture succumb to the logic of the production process and the market.

Clearly, this student did not express the ideas in their own words; there is no way of knowing whether he or she understood the original. The student was convicted of plagiarism.

3.2 Referencing

A most important feature of academic work is the proper acknowledgement of the work of others in relation to your own work. When planning any kind of study the first thing to do, after defining your subject area, is to review the literature available on the subject. It may be helpful to consider recording all the information that you have consulted as a database on a computer. This will save a lot of time later on, and in particular it is important to note where you found the information as well as the details of the reference itself so that it may be traced again.

3.3 Definitions

A reference is any piece of information (book, journal article, or video) to which the writer of a dissertation refers directly either by quotation or by the author's name. A reference gives information about the source (usually an original source) from which the writer of the dissertation has taken or used material. The purpose of a reference is to enable the reader to locate that information as easily and quickly as possible.
Individual references used in the text are, in addition, compiled in a list at the end of a piece of written work.

A bibliography is an extended list of references dealing with particular subject matter, and may include not only the references made by the writer in the text of an dissertation, but also others the writer has found useful, perhaps as background reading, even though they are not directly referred to in the written work itself.

For your dissertation you will only supply a list of references directly used in the dissertation; DO NOT supply a bibliography.

In summary, you are expected in your written work to refer directly by source and/or author to any material that you have used in your dissertation, and to provide a list of those references on separate pages at the end of the dissertation (in other words, NOT within footnotes).

3.4 Why write references?

References are needed both to give credit to authors whose work has been used and to enable readers to find out where material came from in which they may be interested. Readers may wish to check that the reference is a correct citation of a source, and to follow up by reading that source.

References help support an argument and validate any statements that are made. Any phrases, sentences or paragraphs taken from another source must be acknowledged, as must ideas from such a source; if the acknowledgement is not made it is called plagiarism and your own work will be discredited, and sanctions imposed if this is discovered.

3.5 Cite Them Right Harvard Referencing System

There are many methods of writing and arranging references so that they may be accurately and systematically recorded. We believe that the Cite Them Right Harvard system is the most appropriate to use for your dissertation, and it is mandatory – you must use it. The Cite Them Right Harvard system is based on the author's surname and is easy to use and to check. Do NOT mix it up with any other referencing scheme (such as ones using numbered references in the text). You must read Appendix C of this Guide, which gives a full description of The Cite Them Right Harvard Referencing System.

4 Student’s responsibilities

4.1 Meeting Guidelines in this Manual

It is your responsibility to comply with the guidelines in this manual. Failure may cause the final dissertation mark to be reduced or may invalidate, delay, or prevent the successful completion of the dissertation. However, in most matters these guidelines may be overridden by the Dissertation supervisor, Dissertation Coordinator or appropriate Business School administration. However, any such changes will only be valid and binding if they are committed to writing, circulated and signed by the relevant parties before submission of the final work.

4.2 Selection of Topic

Selection of a suitable dissertation topic rests with the student: however, any member of staff may be approached for broad guidance on potential topics, at their convenience. The student cannot be required by a member of staff to undertake a topic that is not acceptable to the student. 

4.3 Contact with Dissertation supervisor

Once a Dissertation supervisor is assigned, you will be advised who he/she is. The member of staff coordinating the allocation process will always try to take into account students’ chosen research area and/or approach to research in order to find a suitable fit with the interests/experience of the academic staff who are taking on supervisory duties in the year concerned. Notwithstanding this, all of our academic staff are more than able to carry out Masters dissertation supervision regardless of the research topic given staff’s generic knowledge of research processes and the process of completing a Masters dissertation. Students will be allocated to a supervisor who will provide support, guidance and facilitate meetings.

Supervisory meetings will be group sessions. There will be a maximum of 5 group supervision meetings. Group sessions will still allow students to ask individual questions as well as to discuss common problems or issues as a group. The precise content of meetings may vary depending on students’ progress at a particular time but it is suggested that the group supervision meetings have this focus:

• Late April: Discussion on NBS8372’s proposal and research design.
• Mid-May: Literature review & Methodology.
• Early June: Data collection.
• Late June or Early July: Data analysis and findings.
• Late July or Early August: Writing up and drawing conclusions.

Your dissertation supervisor’s task is to help you develop your research ideas and put them into practice in a fruitful manner, not to dictate a specific topic to you. In other words, their role is to guide and support your research, even though this may involve asking difficult questions about rationale, practicalities, and contributions of your study all of which will be aimed at making your research more robust. However, it is important that you understand that the dissertation is intended to provide an opportunity for students to pursue a research project independently. It is your research and your responsibility to design, conduct, and write the dissertation. If you have any concerns about your supervisor’s advice, you should discuss these first as part of a supervision meeting. In the very rare instances when your concerns cannot be alleviated by such discussion, you can contact the dissertation module leader.

4.4 Managing the Dissertation Supervision Sessions

It is in your interests to attend supervision meetings and to plan carefully for them. If you are unable to attend group supervision meeting, you should not expect your supervisor to arrange a substitute individual meeting. The supervision process should be used to discuss ideas with your Dissertation supervisor and to get feedback on whether the work you are planning to do is at the appropriate level for the Masters qualification. You may contact your Dissertation supervisor by email if you have a question to ask. It is likely that staff will be unavailable during August as this is a holiday period. It is a good idea to ask supervisors about their availability well in advance.

Try to follow these rules:

1. All meetings with your Dissertation supervisor should be arranged by appointment and you should attend all. You should arrive at the agreed meeting place on time.
2. If you have work for the Dissertation supervisor to appraise then it should be submitted to them sufficiently in advance of the meeting to allow them time to read and comment on it. This should be at least a week before the meeting.
3. Always arrive at a tutorial meeting with an agenda of the areas that you wish to discuss
4. Be prepared to show the Dissertation supervisor the sources of information that you are currently consulting for your dissertation.
5. Maintain contact by email with your Dissertation supervisor throughout the dissertation period and if you are having problems let them know.

As a student you can expect:

• A maximum of 5 meetings (see above for details of group meeting format) with your dissertation supervisor and contact over email where necessary (extended e-mail contact may count as a meeting).
• Guidance on the standard of your work and its structure
• Staff to meet you at the arranged time
• Comments on ONE draft of your dissertation providing that it is submitted to your supervisor in July or other agreed time.

As a student you cannot expect:

• Your Dissertation supervisor to provide you with substantial reference material.
• Your Dissertation supervisor to read and comment on copious drafts of your dissertation and correct your English.
• Your Dissertation supervisor to give you specific direction on the content of your work, or in general to take decisions on your behalf.
• Your Dissertation supervisor to state in advance of the examination of the dissertation as to whether it will pass.
• To change Dissertation supervisor without just cause. Problems should be raised with the dissertation co-ordinator

Remember: your Dissertation supervisor (along with another member of staff) is also your examiner and as such must restrict their input into your work.

4.5 Meeting Deadlines

The deadlines specified in the manual are set to assure that the dissertation moves forward in a timely fashion and that undue pressure is not placed on the student, dissertation supervisor, or other school staff.

4.6 Originality

It is the student's responsibility to verify that the title and the approach of the dissertation are reasonably original. However, a student may not claim exclusive rights to a topic area.

4.7 Referencing 

See Appendix C

Appendix A

NUBS Policy on Research Ethics and assessing fieldwork and travel risk and GDPR 

The University has a duty of care to the human subjects of research carried out by students under its aegis and therefore needs to institute safeguards to ensure their interests are properly protected. In addition, the Business School needs to ensure the safety and wellbeing of students and the protection of the University’s good name. You must not proceed with any empirical research until you have been granted approval by your supervisor. If you do not gain approval you cannot submit your dissertation. You risk failing the module if you have not gained the required approval. As soon as your supervisor has approved your forms (notified to you via email or through Blackboard), you may begin any fieldwork you are undertaking.

The following ethical approval form is based on the university’s ethics form that is used to identify high-risk projects that require full ethical review. Please note that student projects ought to be low-risk projects and generally must not be of a type that requires faculty ethics committee approval. Supervisors need to ensure that a project under their supervision does not have the potential to harm the participants, the student or the university. They should not sign off projects where there are doubts about this, as this may lead to a loss of insurance cover and/or the incurring of personal liabilities! Projects that are too risky need to be changed and/or specific safeguards need to be put in place to turn it into a low risk project. Supervisors need to assess the risk of a project as a whole. For example, the use of a gatekeeper is generally a factor that increases risk. However, if a student wants to survey all business schools students about an uncontroversial topic, he might need to use the programme secretaries to send out an email. Technically, this is use of a gatekeeper, but this case does not really raise ethical issues. The case is different if a student wants to interview employees in a firm where his father is HR director and would serve as a gatekeeper. This latter case is ethically problematic as it raises concerns that (a) the gatekeeper has a conflict of interest and (b) whether participants can really give consent voluntarily. It becomes more problematic if the topic of the project is employment relations and less problematic if the student asks questions about gardening. It should usually be possible to drastically reduce the risk of a project by putting some safeguards in place (such as altering the time and place of data collection). If any of the sub-questions in any section is answered affirmatively, supervisors will need to provide a written justification why the project as a whole is still low-risk at the end of the form.

Alterations to an approved project require further ethical approval. Unauthorised deviations from an approved project plan constitute research misconduct and – depending on severity – can lead to disciplinary consequences for students up to the expulsion from the programme.

In addition to this form please be aware that both fieldwork, including primary data collection, and travel requires appropriate risk assessments. Please consult the school’s fieldwork and travel policies for details. Please complete all sections of the form (this may just involve ticking “no” for the first question in each section). Some explanatory notes on specific points in these sections can be found on the following pages. Additional guidance on ethical approval as well as details on things like informed consent, etc.

Guidance notes on specific sections (as of August 2015)

Note that these are specific guidance notes in relation to aspects likely to be relevant for NUBS projects. They will be updated in the future to reflect lessons learned from past projects.

Project synopsis: Please be clear about aims and scope, proposed methods and where relevant details on data collection, participant recruitment, consent, briefing and debriefing. Please focus on the nuts and bolts here – for example, if a student wants to do an email survey, the form will need to state how he plans to obtain email addresses. If a student wants to ask people on the street, the form should state where, when and how this will happen.

Section 4. In the past this was often understood as “no research on the NHS”. This is not the case. Students can obviously use publicly available data on regional NHS spending and, say, regional morbidity rates for various diseases or use anonymised secondary data from, say, the Health Survey for England to look at health care usage.

Section 5 (e). This is not relevant in cases where the project involves only the analysis of secondary, anonymised data, such as, say, the study of victimisation using the British Crime Survey (available via the UK dataservice). It is relevant in all cases where respondents can be potentially identified and for all primary data collection, regardless of whether the student intends to anonymise the data later.

There are also restricted use versions of otherwise available datasets covering more sensitive topics (such as the domestic violence modules on the British Crime Survey)
– these should generally be avoided by students.

Section 6. Note that this is highly relevant for a lot of NUBS dissertations involving data collection abroad or for cases where data was collected in the UK and the student wants to return home to write up the dissertation. You will need to ensure that these data transfers do not fall foul of relevant data protection laws (in the case of the UK mainly the GDPR (2018) legislation). Whether data is sensitive will depend to some extent on the specific project and on local laws. Please be sensible with the definition of “commercial contract” or “license”. For example, most government data is technically released under the Open Government License. Clearly, this does not mean that students should avoid a project that regressed UK GDP against growth.

Similarly, we have a subscription to Bloomberg data. This is clearly a commercial contract, but again this is not problematic. Please draw a line where violations of license conditions can cause harm to the student/the university (such as cases where data abuse can lead to more than trivial punishment or can restrict the university’s future access to data, i.e., where data abuse leads to a ban of all of the university’s users). Please also ensure that students are aware of any eventual conditions attached to data, for example, in relation to sharing the data with others.

Section 7. Please be aware that all international travel by students, inside or outside of the UK, needs to be risk-assessed by the student and signed off by supervisors. If the risk associated with a student conducting fieldwork in a specific country cannot be judged, the project should not be signed off.