Although aware of different dissertation types (traditional, work-based, and 'literature review') in my discipline 'construction project management' the first two types are much more prevalent. This field mainly employs social sciences research into management issues, or natural sciences research into materials. Therefore it is rare to see any dissertation without primary research. I'd be interested in opening this up for discussion to see a) in which fields is this approach more frequent, and b) what the key success criteria for dissertations that do not employ primary research would be?
My background
For my own final year project, I did a pure design-build-test project. For my masters I did interviews and built the hardware and software to solve the problem. For my PhD I processed national secondary data and put together some hardware and software to gather national primary data, and disprove current thinking.
The question dictates the research.
I then taught research to electrical engineers, where the emphasis is on doing experimental work, to management staff who did theory development (which is basically library research) and to construction management students, where the emphasis was on building, and the social side of malls, housing etc. All groups did valid research because they posed a research question, and then proceeded to find out the answer to it with the most suitable tools. The type of data that they (and I) needed dictated the type of research they each had to do. The electrical students did their own experiments; the managers and construction students did their theory development and questionnaires etc. The 3 M's: Men, Money and Machines are all equally valid research areas, and a student may specialise in researching just one slice because of time constraints.
The danger of secondary research:
At university there is a sad tendency for poorer or weaker students to do secondary research, as this can be done with little funding or without having to design, fund and build an experiment. So we have to be careful to ensure that all our students learn to design and experiment, and not "just" do library reviews.
Interest should guide
What we should not do is force our students to do qualitative or quantitative research; secondary or primary research; Men, Money, Machinery research, but let them follow their interests. I wrote a paper on the questions my construction, economics, and management students posed and found a similar distribution in the scholarly field. See “Research in Construction Engineering: the nature of questions asked”.
To answer your subquestions
a) You can compare with the scholarly literature, but must also ask yourself, “What should we be researching in the future?”
b) The key success is whether the question is a good research question to ask, and has the question been answered now?
Conference Paper Research in Construction Engineering: the nature of questions asked
As the previous answers suggest: Secondary research also works.
However, I caution those undertaking it: It is very work and research intense. It has to be 100% whereas shortcomings in fieldwork is easier to accept for some.
Kind Regards
Roland
The type of research secondary or primary or both would depend to a great extent on the objectives of the research and the reliability and accessibility of data. In case of research in Finance area with valid data bases a great amount of reported research is based on secondary data. It is usually better to triangulate the findings from different sources of data for more credibility.
Thank to everyone for their responses. I thought I would give the question a week or so to see how much traction the question got before 'closing the loop' on this (although I am aware that on RG the questions effectively open, hence these 'thanks' are provided for future answers also). You have all provided good insight and it is fascinating to see similarities in how UG and PG construction management research is undertaken and supervised globally.
I originally posed the question, because, after many years of supervising such projects, I had rarely supervised or reviewed dissertations that did not make use of primary data, yet recently in among the latest batch, a few of these cropped up. It seems from reviewing the responses (and doing some further 'digging') that - yes, a 'pure' literature review' dissertation is acceptable, providing that a suitable approach is adopted. Key to this is:
Should the student evidence all three of these aspects, then the reader will have much greater confidence around the use of secondary data only in such a project.
It depend on the topic and research aim, so I think it is not necessary
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Geoscience
- Asia
- India