Academic Writer

academic writer: organization: context: research

Research
If you are doing primary research it is fairly standard to describe how the paper was researched in the opening paragraphs. This might come after your introduction. In longer papers it may well be included in a separate section called 'Methodology' or 'Research Methods', etc.
EXAMPLE 1

Background to the study
In the English Department we are working on a research project which is examining the feasibility and practicality of compiling corpora of learner data, and whether they can be utilised as a language learning resource. The English Department is currently piloting a new English for Academic Purposes (EAP) credit-based subject which involves the students completing a number of written assignments throughout the duration of the course. We selected a group of first year Electrical Engineering students studying EAP and asked them to hand in all written assignments in both electronic format and hard copy to their lecturers. The electronic versions of their assignments were then inputted and combined to form our initial corpus of written learner data.

EXAMPLE 2

The social impact of factory closure in northern Germany
Throughout 1992, we conducted research, funded by the university grants commission (UGC), into how people have been coping with unemployment in the north of Germany. We focused on four factories in total, two of which had been shut already. In the latter two communities we have carried out a questionnaire survey of a 10% sample of the workers and their wives who lost their jobs at closure. We subsequently taped lengthy interviews with a smaller cross-section of survey respondents. We have also been interviewing 'key informants' such as employers, union officials, local authority officers, educationalists and health and welfare professionals.
Our focus in this paper is on the feelings and perceptions of those most directly affected by factory closure, so in what follows we shall draw primarily on the interviews with ex-employees and their wives in two communities where the factories had been closed for six and eighteen months respectively at the time of the interview.

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Academic Writer 2000