Task
Research essay is a clearly written and well-organised essay that involves researching source material and synthesising what you learn from it with your own ideas. Research essay has a structure typical for all essays: introduction, body and conclusion. One main reason for essays to fail or get poor marks is not because the writers are unintelligent but because they have not spent enough time organising their work.Research Essay, you will construct a single research question to guide your reading and thinking. The answer that you develop is the central assertion or position that your paper will argue for.
A good research question is essential to guide your research essay. It pinpoints exactly what you want to find out and gives your work a clear focus and purpose. Research questions should be focused on a single problem or issue and specific enough to answer thoroughly. In Assessment 3, you will use library-based research (using peer-reviewed published research papers) relevant to your field of study.
The process of developing your research question follows several steps:
- First, try to find a topic that truly interests you (it could be a broad topic at this point).
- Then you need to discover, narrow and focus on a researchable topic for your assessment purposes.
- Identify a practical research problem that you will address which align with your assessment.
- Do some preliminary reading to find out about topical debates and issues.
- Narrow down a specific niche that you want to focus on.
- Pose your topic as a question to be answered or a problem to be solved
- Talk with your Unit Convener about your topic and research question (RQ)
- Then you need to find, select/ short list your reading sources.
- You can use the library databases, unit’s readings, lecture materials etc.
Here are some sample RQs.
1. In what ways do attitudes contribute to behaviour change in social marketing / political communication / environmental communication?
2. In what ways do motivation contribute to behaviour change in environmental communication?
3. In what way does emotion contribute to behaviour change in the space of online shopping?
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