How to do your Social Research Project or Dissertation

How to do your Social Research Project or Dissertation provides a straight-talking, easy-to-navigate, and reassuring guide to support final-year social science undergraduates. Uniquely shaped by real social science undergraduates from a range of institutions, the book includes their advice to help you through with what can be a daunting, but rewarding stage of your degree. From the look and feel of the book, to the development of the chapter content and the advice it provides, students have been involved at every stage of the book's development to ensure it is focused on what's important to you.

Expert advice from real supervisors across the subject disciplines in the 'Working with your supervisor' feature also helps you to make the most of research supervision, and learn from the experience of real researchers in your chosen field. By providing anecdotes, words of wisdom, scenarios, or simply reminders, hints, and tips on how best to prepare for meetings, and communicate effectively, How to do your Social Research Project or Dissertation is the most complete guide to facilitate the student-supervisor working relationship.

Dedicated chapters cover all the typical stages of a research project or dissertation in the social sciences, while their carefully constructed structure allows you to quickly and efficiently navigate the content. Throughout the book, you'll focus on three key questions: 'What do I need to know?', 'What do I need to think about?' and 'What do I need to do?'. In so doing, each chapter gives you a clear and direct checklist of actions as you progress through your dissertation or research project, keeping you organized, motivated, and confident.

The book's online resources include a wealth of free-to-access materials, including:

Author videos - Additional advice around key challenges for each chapter, including developing a research idea, managing your time, and writing up your dissertation.

Supervision guidance Advice and tips on how to approach your supervision meetings, including tasks to help you plan for meetings and to build a productive relationship with your supervisor.

Doing academic presentations Support with planning and delivering presentations, including tips on what a dissertation presentation might include, as well as author videos showing examples of a good and bad presentations.

_ Dissertation templates Templates for dissertations, showing how dissertations might look different depending on which theoretical and methodological approaches you use. This includes notes on chapter content and tips on dissertation structure.

Research plan templates Templates for you to use for planning your project, including helping you to get started and complete the dissertation, and to manage your time using key milestones and recommended timescales and targets.

Guidance on developing and designing your research question - A set of questions divided into categories and designed to help you formulate ideas, develop your thinking, set your research questions, help you later on in the process to consolidate your argument and consider the contribution of your work.

Delve Even Deeper Even more Delve Deeper recommendations and research suggestions, including a list of freely available data sets, links and resources to help you understand SPSS and NVivo processes and tools, analysis tools and help for specific research methods, and guidance on using vlogs, blogs, and other public resources, as well as using social media for your research.

Bad, better, and best examples of literature reviews, questionnaires, interview questions, and observation plans Examples of each of these key elements of your project deliberately designed to demonstrate how you can improve your work, and highlighted with annotations to help you gain a deeper understanding of how best to approach these stages of your project.

Examples of research proposals Examples of research proposals for different social sciences to give you that extra support and an idea of what to expect. Here you will find tips on how to build a proposal and consider how this is useful for planning the dissertation.

What do I need to think about? and What do I need to do? checklists digital versions of the end-of-chapter checklists for you to download and use.

Dr Tom Clark is a Lecturer in Research Methods at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is interested in all aspects of method and methodology, particularly with respect to learning and teaching. His other interests have variously focussed on the sociology of evil, student experiences of higher education, and football fandom. Tom's work has been published in a wide variety of journals, including, Sociology, Qualitative Research, Social Policy and Administration, Teaching in Higher Education, the Journal of Education and Work, and Qualitative Social Work.


Dr Liam Foster is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Sheffield, UK, who specializes in pensions and theories of ageing. Liam also has a longstanding interest in methods and has published widely in this area, including Beginning Statistics for Social Scientists (with Sir Ian Diamond and Dr Julie Jefferies). He has been an invited speaker at the Department for Education, Department for Work and Pensions, the European Parliament in Brussels, the House of Lords and the UN in New York, as a world leading expert on ageing. Liam is a member of the UK Social Policy Association Executive Committee. He is also the Managing Editor of Social Policy and Society.


Alan Bryman was Professor of Organizational and Social Research at the University of Leicester from 2005 to 2017. Prior to this he was Professor of Social Research at Loughborough University for thirty-one years. His main research interests were in leadership, especially in higher education, research methods (particularly mixed methods research), and the 'Disneyization' and 'McDonaldization' of modern society. Alan was also the author of the bestselling textbook Social Research Methods (Oxford University Press, 2015) as well as contributing to a range of leading journals: he was an extraordinarily well-cited and internationally renowned social scientist.