TOP TIP # 11 - Secondary Sources when Referencing

When you want to reference something that someone else has cited, it is called a secondary reference.  This is how you go about referencing secondary sources:

 

1. We always reference the source that we are looking at. 
2. So if I'm reading an article by author Smith 2020 and in the article, Smith cited John from 2018, it is Smith that must be referenced in the Bibliography. 
3. In the in-text citation you indicate that Smith 2020 referenced John, 2018 as follows: (Jones, 2018 as cited by Smith, 2020)

One guideline is that you should aim for most of your sources to be primary sources.  In other words, always go to find the original author (original source). Avoid having too many secondary sources.  It is always best practice to go back to the orginal source.

TOP TIP # 10 - "The title is tentative"

For the first part of this semester we have been focusing on the title of your research topics, considering a phenomenon to be studied, a population group to study, an industry or type of business, a geographical area and whether the study is qualitative or quantitative.  In other words, we've been thinking about a lot of key parts to the study you will propose to do. 

However, remember that especially the early stages of research (that you are busy with at the moment) are iterative, meaning that you need to go through cycles of considering the title, the background, the problem, the key questions, the objectives and the rationale. It is possible that some of the key elements you decided in your title will change when you go through these iterations... so this is a reminder that your title is tentative. In other words, you need to keep coming back to the title to see if it is still an accurate reflection of your project. 

TOP TIP # 9 - Paradigms in context of INRS

You have just been introduced to three paradigms, interpretevism, positivism and critical realist.  The first step is to understand what paradigms are and how they influence the research study... so in your assignment topic, if you're doing a quantitative study, then you will be using the positivist paradigm. If you are doing qualitative you will be using interpretevist paradigm. If you are using mixed methods (which we don't recommend) you would be using a critical realist paradigm. 

For the summative assessment question you are given three articles to analyse and de-construct, reading them to understand the various methodological decisions that were made. Each article is a different paradigm (of the three given above). You will need to read the article and look for clues that indicate each paradigm. There is one of each paradigm from the three articles