Research Process/Activities

1. Select Topic
2. Focus Question
3. Design Study
4. Collect Data
5. Analyze Data
6. Interpret Data
7. Inform Others/Report Writing
1. Selection of Topic
a. Identify the depth and breath of your
research/longer time & additional cost

b.researcher skill/expertise and interest

c.interesting &catchy
Essentials in Conducting research

Decide on the Research Focus

Activity and involvement, especially
where there are good contacts with
others working in the field, produce
good research.
Convergence of activities or interests
can produce good research - for
instance an idea and a method, or two
different perspectives/roles on the
same issue.
Intuition - feeling that the work is
important, timely, or 'right'.
A grasp of theoretical or conceptual
issues which the study engages with.
A study which is undertaken because
it is easy, cheap, quick or convenient
often results in an unsuccessful
research project.
A study which is intended only as a
vehicle for a specific method of
investigation or technique will often
fail.
Research done primarily for formal,
publication, or financial purposes
rather than an interest in the area,
will often fail.
Nonetheless, you do need to being forming your
research questions here, so here are a few points to
bear in mind :
It should be obvious from the need to make an
argument, and the need to show some originality or
personal contemplation, that a good dissertation is
much more likely to be narrowly focused than
broad. If your dissertation is "Environmental Waste
Management and the Law", you are going to spread
yourself so thinly that everything you write will have
been written before and no strong argument can be
made. If your dissertation is "The Interrelationship
between Theft Act 1968 s.2 and the Concept of
'Waste' as Goods in European Law" you are going to
be going into detail on a very narrow area, allowing
you to go into depth, and develop a real argument.
The three sorts of research question are
exploratory, i.e. finding out what is happening;
descriptive, i.e. providing an accurate profile of
persons, events, or situations; and explanatory,
i.e. seeking an explanation of a situation or
problem, often in the form of causal relationships
.
You should aim to ask questions which,
ultimately, are explanatory. Bear in mind,
however, that an explanatory research question
such as "Why do polluters decide to violate the
law ?" will, inevitably, require a number of
descriptive questions to be answered before
moving on to the explanatory stage.
Avoid allowing a pre-decision on method or
technique to decide the questions to be
asked. As well as avoiding sensible
questions because it will require you to use
a methodology you are not very familiar
with, it is a mistake to ask less sensible
questions simply because it will let you try
out a methodology that seems rather fun.
Avoid posing questions that cannot be
asked, either in general or with the
methods it is feasible that you attempt.
Bear in mind that this dissertation is
intended to occupy roughly 40% of a full-
time student's year on the course -
projects which purport to carry out socio-
legal research on a national, or
international, basis are not envisaged.
 Avoid asking questions which have
already been answered
satisfactorily. A good knowledge of
the literature can help avoid this.
This is not to say you can never
reopen an issue someone else has
discussed, rather that you should
have something new or different to
say about the area, not simply
endorse in full the earlier work.
The Literature Review.
Accepted as a standard part of the
research process in other fields,
formal literature reviews are less
well established in legal studies,
perhaps because entire research
projects can appear to consist of
little more than literature reviews
with attitude. In this context, you
need to do general reading of
existing secondary sources
At this point, your literature review
is not intended to culminate in a
critical assessment of the value of
everything that you have read. I
have seen formal literature reviews
which are simply paragraph after
paragraph of book review style
commentary on relevant secondary
sources.
At this stage your reading should
be clarifying - and perhaps
changing - your research
questions; making sure that you do
not waste time doing something
which someone else has already
done competently; and gaining the
general grasp of the area
necessary for using any of the
socio-legal techniques discussed in
this workshop.
Structure the Work to be Done.
together with your supervisor, to structure your
dissertation and plan the use of your time

Work on Each Section.

Having broken the dissertation into smaller
sections you need to carry out your detailed
research for each such section. The exact
methodology you need to use will, obviously, vary
according to the purpose of each chapter. If your
entire dissertation is doctrinal legal research, then
you will probably need to carry out detailed
intelligence-gathering through more critical reading
of secondary sources, consultations of primary
sources, and use of perhaps more obscure sources
such as government reports.
Tastes differ as to whether you should do
the research for each section first, and then
write the entire dissertation; or write up as
you go along. A good LL.M. dissertation will
draw upon far more information, critique,
and ideas, than you can keep in your head
at once. The solution is to deal with each
area separately. So, on that basis, after
you have gained your information base for
your chapter, you need to think critically
about the data (which may itself produce a
need for further data gathering), and then
write the first draft of the chapters.
Bringing It All Together
Having written all these sections, you now
need to put them together with a
good introduction, and a strong
conclusion, while asking yourself the
following - is the dissertation as a
whole well structured; is any section
unnecessary for the dissertation as
a whole; is it repetitive (use cross-
references instead!); does it make
the point you set out to make ? Be
dispassionate. If you find, at this
stage, that more work is necessary,
go away and do it. Do not try to
gloss over a weakness that you
recognise.
Now rewrite, purely in the interests of
style, grammar, and spelling. A good
computer program can help with all
these !
Finally, check for developments since
you began the dissertation, rewrite it
one more time, and submit it in good
time. You should bear in mind that
your dissertation must be properly
bound, and that this can take a few
weeks, depending upon the time of
year and the demands on the
bindery.
General guidance for legal
writing
1. Remember who your
audience is: the academic
Your dissertation should be written
in an appropriate academic style.
Take a look at articles written by
legal academics. You should have
been referred to many during your
course.
2.Good dissertations /Thesis
usually conform to some
recognizable overall structure
An example of such a structure is:
*the introduction
*the narration setting the background
and generating the issue
*the outline of the points to be proven
*the proofs for the argument
*the proofs against the argument
*the conclusion.
Another example:
Introduction including aims
Literature Survey
Method
Results
Discussion
Conclusions
Some commentators would say
make your pattern explicit. The
introduction The conclusion will
normally consist of two elements:
** a summary of the dissertation
and, most importantly, the
**conclusions, i.e. an indication of
how and in what ways the
dissertation has contributed to the
field of study to which the
dissertation relates.
3. Structure information
carefully
Various structures can be used, for
example:
hierarchically, from the general to
the more specific and vice versa
by time, i.e. chronological order
by logic, either deductively or
inductively by value, from most
highly recommended to least
recommended.
The pattern should be
appropriate for the information
presented. Another guideline that
may aid clarity and intelligibility
is to write a dissertation so that it
easily scanned by the reader so
as to discover the gist of the
argument presented in the
dissertation.
4. Each part of a dissertation/
thesis should be clearly structured
down to sentence level
A good adage is: one thought per
sentence, one topic per paragraph, and
related paragraphs together.
Avoid paragraphs full of long involved
sentences. Avoid paragraphs consisting
just of staccato sentences. Explain
terms used.
Avoid sequences of long
paragraphs or of very short
paragraphs (although occasionally
a sentence of one paragraph might
be used to emphasise a point). One
useful discipline is to write a topic
sentence for each paragraph
encapsulating the point to be made
in that paragraph (some would
argue that this should be the first
sentence in each paragraph).
Variety in sentence and paragraph
length (without going to extremes)
help to liven the mind of the writer
and reader so that interest is
maintained.
It should be clear how each
paragraph relates to the paragraph
before and after it. If the
relationship is not obvious then the
relationship needs to be made
explicit.
As with paragraphs, so with
sections and chapters: it should
be clear how each
section/chapter relates to the
section/chapter before and
after it. If the relationship is not
obvious then the relationship
needs to be made explicit.
A more general way of putting
the same point is that
transitions between parts of an
argument require careful
attention. At the end of each
part of the argument prepare
the reader for the next part of
the argument.
Break the argument up into
manageable parts for the reader.
Most people can rarely recall,
without prompting, more than nine
things at once (or 7 plus or minus
two). Some commentators would
say: never have more than nine
chapters, more than nine sections
within a chapter, more than nine
paragraphs in a section.
The elements of a dissertation/
thesis

*Defining Originality.
*Carrying out empirical work
that has not been done before.
*Making a synthesis of things
that have not been put together
before.
*Trying out something in this
country which has only been
done elsewhere.
*Taking a new technique and
applying it to a new area.
*Looking at topics that people in my
discipline have not looked at before.
*Testing existing knowledge in an
original way.
*Providing a single original
technique, observation or result in
an otherwise unoriginal but
competent piece of research.
*Bringing new evidence to bear on
an old issue
.