Reference no: EM132349022

Prepare a research plan on "A study on measuring the development and driving effects of MICE industry in Macao".

Assignment task

The RESEARCH PLAN should be approximately 4,000-5,000 words in length.

In order to complete your dissertation, you must first establish the theoretical basis for your research, which is provided by the Review of Current Thinking (Literature Review).

You will then need to develop your Research Methodology, explaining how you plan to build on your literature review, with your own primary research.

These are the purposes of this Research Plan assignment which should be structured as follows:

Title

A working title for the dissertation that reflects its focus. This may be the principal research question that it seeks to answer.

Introduction and research purpose

This section should explain the ‘what' and ‘why' of your investigation. It should include the following:
a clear statement of the issue, problem or research question(s) to be addressed in the dissertation, the overall purpose or goal of the research,
a discussion of why this issue is important, within a wider organisational and business context.

It will be useful to refer to appropriate secondary sources, in justifying the importance or topical nature of your investigation.

Review of current thinking

Here you need to explain where your investigation fits in the wider body of literature and perhaps informs a current debate in that literature. You should critically evaluate carefully selected concepts, theories and ideas which might be useful for investigating your research topic and taking it forward. You will need to discuss material from a range of relevant academic journal articles, as well as appropriate secondary research. All sources must be referenced using the Harvard system.

A key requirement here is to develop a clear argument, linking the literature to the issue, problem, or questions that you have identified in the introduction; so that we can see how your investigation is informed by current knowledge and how it might enhance that knowledge.

At the end of your review you should conclude by summarising the key ideas in the review, which will be helpful for the development of the primary research.

Methodology

This section will explore ‘how' you will conduct your primary research and ‘why' you have chosen to design your research in that particular way. It needs to demonstrate how your chosen strategy and methods will help to inform the question(s), problem or issue which you identified in the introduction and it needs to build logically on findings from the literature review. You will need to consider any constraints you might face - typically time and money.

You will need to identify clearly:
which data you need to satisfy your research objectives the sampling frame - from whom will you collect this data?
how data are to be analysed any special expertise you might need to acquire or develop to collect or analyse your data (e.g. software, statistical, interviewing skills)
any access and ethical issues you are likely to encounter during your research and how these would be addressed.
and offer a full justification for the choices you have made.

Primary Research Instrument

For this section of the work for your plan, you need to develop your principal research instrument e.g.
for interviews or focus groups; a schedule of how they will be structured and the questions or themes to be explored, any visual props to be used etc. for surveys, a draft questionnaire

This should be placed in the Appendices of your plan and cross referenced within your Methodology section. It will not be considered part of the word count.

If you are using mixed methods, it is acceptable to include just one of your research instruments.

This assignment has been designed to provide you with an opportunity to demonstrate your achievement of the following module learning outcomes:

LO 1 Demonstrate an in-depth critical understanding of a chosen aspect of business or management through an extended self-managed dissertation project.

LO 2 Critically evaluate and use a range of quantitative and qualitative methods for providing information and evaluating options in an uncertain business environment.

Task requirements

Should be presented using 1.5 line-spacing and 11 or 12 sized Arial Font.

The Research Ethics Checklist will need to be signed by your supervisor, by the due date for this assignment. You should aim to email the completed ethics checklist to your supervisor at least 7 days before the deadline for this assignment. The Research Ethics Checklist can be found under the formal documents tab. Further information about the university's research ethics procedures is on:

It is compulsory to

use academic texts, (journal articles rather than textbooks) which should be cited in the Harvard format (e.g. Bloggs, 2010). You should therefore ensure you access the university's electronic databases such as ABI Inform (Proquest) and/or Emerald. Pay particular attention to how recent your sources are. The 1990s are now some twenty years ago so depending on your research topic, knowledge at that time may have been superseded.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If, after submission of the research plan, you want to change your dissertation to consider a completely different business problem or question, you would need to complete the Change of Topic or Core Focus form on Blackboard and have it signed by your supervisor before proceeding. This is because a major change to the direction and focus of the work would require different literature and different primary research.Practical context and rationale for research (why is the research necessary?)

Remember, with research it is important to include cited research when developing the introduction and rationale for the research as well as all parts to the work.

Research Question, Aims and Objectives (5/15)
For the research issue I would suggest having a single aim or question as this will simplify the research in terms of having a clear focus.

You then need to develop objectives. For the objectives I would suggest the following approach. You simply need to fill in the blanks. The section of learning units on blackboard cover the issue of aims/questions/objectives in some detail and please do spend some time reviewing these videos.

To evaluate the XXX literature(s) in order to shed light on YYY
To apply a ZZZ primary approach to assess YYY
To develop recommendations for BBB that CCC

Academic Context (development and discussion of mind map or similar technique) (5/15)
The mindmap is quite basic and some of this stems back to not having a clear and narrow focus to your research.

You have provided some broad issues and again part of the issue with this research is the need to focus this further. In addition to this the cited research is mostly context based information and again having a clear subject based focus as I indicate at the beginning of this feedback is really important.

You can review sample student work on blackboard to help understand the approach and style to a literature review. The subject of these dissertations will be different but as I say you can start to gain a better sense of what a literature review looks like which will be relevant for the research plan (next assignment).

Attachment:- Research Plan.rar