Dissertation involves research, so before moving with the dissertation, one thing which was supposed to be done is to understand the meaning of research and its aspects.   To understand the meaning of research and its aspect the following question was to be asked…

Discuss what are the three key aspects of research? Which one of them you consider the most important, or are they equally important?”

And here is my reply

WHAT IS A RESEARCH?

Various literatures has used Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) definition to define what is research, according to Dawson (2009) who also quoted HEFCE Defined research as “an original investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge and understanding”. A research can be further described as basic research or applied research. Applied research aim at acquiring new knowledge by undertaking a piece of original investigation.

From this definition three aspects of a research are realized which are originality, acquiring new knowledge and understanding and contribute to global knowledge.

ASPECTS OF RESEARCH

Originality: In a research the piece of work must be an original of a researcher, originality can be from working to a new project which has not been done before or working to a project done before but using new ways and tools. On the other hand originality can be achieved by using existing data and apply them in a new way or new area. The researcher needs to produce original work through logical argument using genuine source of information and literature.

Knowledge and understanding, in this aspect of the research; the researcher must gain a new knowledge while doing the project, the researcher will use tools and method to collected data, this data is processed to get meaningful information which is then analyzed. The information can give the researcher higher understanding of the data and be a able to answer “why” the data behave and lead to results obtained, this is referred to as knowledge. Then the knowledge is put into practice and used to recommend on what should be done after seeing the results. Therefore knowledge and understanding help the researcher to add new ideas from what they know.

Creating new knowledge: The last aspect of the research is the contribution of knowledge to the world. The research done need to have benefit to the respective domain. The researcher need to use exiting knowledge from respective domain and may come up with new theories and invention or results which can add to the existing knowledge. The knowledge can be spread to others by putting in books, journals, reports and other forms of media.

CONCLUSION

To my opinion the three aspects have got equal importance, they are like human body parts, they depend each other, when a researcher is making effort to make his/her research original may find by doing that without doubt will be acquiring new knowledge, as Phillip and Pugh (2005: 47) quoted by Dawson, C.W. (2009) explained that “intelligence gathering” involves collecting data and information, but this will not be enough if we cannot understand it and contribute to knowledge. Therefore all aspects have equal importance.

REFERENCES

Dawson, C.W. (2009) Projects in Computing and Information Systems: A Student’s Guide, 2nd edition, Addison-Wesley, Harlow ISBN: 978-0-273-72131-4

OECD (2009), available from: http://www.oecd.org/science/sci-tech/2674543.pdf(accessed 5th October 2013)

Thank you for your time, see you next time.

Mateo