Research Techniques

Alan Dix
Lancaster University

Some years ago, while at Huddersfield University, I was timetabled to give a lecture to final year undergraduate students as part of the preparation for their final year projects. The title of the lecture was to be "Research Methods". At first this sounds easy, after all I was clearly doing plenty of reserach so I must know about it... But, of course doing something and knowing about doing it are far from the same thing! Anyway after much sweat I produced the following material. Note however that the title changed to "Research Techniques". Teaching techniques for doing research is one thing - a method!!!!

Since then I have used the basic material with some variations to undergraduate, masters and PhD students. So, although these notes were written with the original audience in mind, I hope that some of the ideas will also be of use students elsewhere including those undertaking MSc projects, PhD studies or doing research in general.

You can read the complete notes on-line or download the OHPs and notes in various formats:

OHP slides

Rich Text Format (rtf), Microsoft Word (.doc, Word for Windows 2), Postscript

full notes, formatted for 2 sided printing

Rich Text Format (rtf), Microsoft Word (.doc, Word for Windows 2), Postscript

full copy of notes as web pages

The notes were produced on Word 5.1 for the Macintosh, so when rtf or .doc files are used different versions of Word pagination may change and so the page numbers in the table of contents may need to be corrected. The Postscript version will not suffer this problem.