Engineering Research Practice: Literature Review and Methodological Approach

Assignment 2 is worth 25% and should be 1000 words long (+/- 100), which includes two main sections: the literature review exercise, where students briefly review scientific literature related to their research question, and the selecting quantitative and/or qualitative approach(s) section, where students determine if they need a quantitative, qualitative, or both approaches for their research problem.

Engineering Research Practice
Assignment 2
Assignment 2 is worth 25% and should be 1000 words long (+/- 100), (without
references or my questions). This assignment has two main sections. The first
section is a literature review and the second section identifies if your research is
quantitative or qualitative. The details are given in the following. Please write your
research topic from assignment 1 or updated topic in the beginning.
Students usually ask me how long each section should be. I suggest that Section 1
to be approximately 800 words and second section to be about 200 words. But there
is no specific guideline.
1. Literature review exercise
In the first part of the assignment you will briefly review some scientific literature that
relates to the research question you identified in your first assignment. Your goal in
reviewing the literature about your topic is to answer the question – “What is known
about my chosen research problem?”
1.1. Some important tips
1. As mentioned before, please provide your research question or updated
research question (If your research question is different to that of the first
assignment.) at the beginning of the second assignment. This is very
important. Please do not forget!
2. Start early! Even writing a brief literature review section takes time!
3. Understand your topic: Before you start reviewing the literature, it is important
for you to have a clear idea about the problem that you are trying to solve.
4. You don’t need to use figures in your literature review. But if you want, you
can. If you do, please make sure to use a caption and refer to each figure in
the text.
5. Please do not copy paste from the papers or books! Rephrase or reword your
sentences.
6. Don’t just report what other people have done! Also try to evaluate, organise
and synthesise.
7. Begin your discussion from a general perspective (but not too general!).
8. As you proceed, deal with more specific but important studies.
9. Don’t forget to insert in-text citations.
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Engineering Research Practice
10. Because this is a short literature review (compared to a thesis for example),
you do not need to have an advance organiser (preview of the topic that you
will talk about in your literature review), or a summary section. You may have
some headings or subheadings if you want, but if you don’t think it is
necessary, forget about it!
11. Use separate paragraphs, when the focus of the discussion changes. Expand
acronyms when you use them for the first time.
1.2. Referencing style
You can either use author name style or numerical style. In the class I mostly
talked about author name style, so if you want to use numerical style, you should
make sure you are using it right. Note that in the author name style, the entries in
the reference list are presented in alphabetical order by the last name of the first
author. However, in the numerical style, the references are numbered
sequentially.
For more information, look at the slides of Week 5 about referencing. Ideally, the
number of references is between 5 and 10, but there is no specific requirement
on the number of references (Just remember to include important references not
any random study.).
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Engineering Research Practice
2.Selecting quantitative and/or qualitative
approach(s)
In the second part of your second assignment, you determine if you need a
quantitative and/or qualitative approach for your research problem chosen in
assignment 1. Note that your specific research question may be only quantitative or
qualitative or it may have both quantitative and qualitative components. Please
answer the questions in sections 2.1 and 2.2 and then determine if your research
question is quantitative and/or qualitative.
2.1. Selecting a quantitative approach
Based on the problem statement developed in Assignment 1, develop a brief answer
for questions given bellow. These questions are all related to characteristics typical
of a problem requiring a quantitative methodology.
1. Define variable(s) that you need to measure in your research (quantitative
source(s) of data).
2. Describe factors that indicate you do not need to work with people directly as
subjects to gather qualitative data.
3. Describe factors that might dictate a high level of structure in this research.
2.2. Selecting a qualitative approach
For each of the following questions, based on the problem statement developed in
Assignment 1, write a brief answer. These questions are all related to characteristics
typical of a problem requiring a qualitative methodology.
1. Describe the qualitative source(s) of data that you need for your research that
cannot easily be converted to quantitative information.
2. Describe factors that indicate you need to work with people directly as
subjects to gather qualitative data.
3. Describe factors that might dictate a low level of structure in this research.
Considering your answers given to the questions in the subsection 2.1 and 2.2, do
you think your research topic requires a quantitative or qualitative methodology or
both?
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