you will produce a report that outlines the issue(s) that you have chosen to address with the organisation. 

MA Dissertation Assessment Guidance

You have two options for what format your dissertation can take and you must choose one of these options:

• A report for a local organisation (10,000 words)
• A standard dissertation (10,000 words)

Details of these are given below but further guidance will be provided in classes and uploaded to the Learning Room.  Whichever option you choose, you will be allocated a supervisor who will support you in your research and writing.  The dissertation is worth 90% of the overall grade for the module.

Report for a self-chosen organisation

Working in collaboration with an organisation on an identified need, you will produce a report that outlines the issue(s) that you have chosen to address with the organisation.  Due to the nature of this assessment specific guidance is difficult to provide as there are a range of organisations that you may choose to work with and their needs and priorities shift.  However, it is likely that you will need to do at least some research as part of this option and write up the findings from this research in the report.  Examples of projects that students have done previously include working with Nottingham Council to examine the difficulties faced by particular migrant groups and considering alternative provision for offender rehabilitation.  Further guidance will also be given in the compulsory Service Learning module and you may do additional work with the organisation that you work with for that module (note that you cannot repeat the work that you do for the Service Learning Module).  Examples of previous students work will also be uploaded to the Learning Room.

Standard dissertation

A dissertation is an extended piece of work which synthesises theory and data to answer a carefully-focused research question. This can be approached in two ways:

1.A piece of empirical piece of work in which you collect your own data

2.A literature-based dissertation

Whichever approach you choose, you must engage with a discussion of how your project engages with public sociology through the knowledge that you develop over the other modules on the course.  Though the exact structure may differ depending on your focus (this will be discussed with your supervisor), the likely structure for the two approaches is as follows:

Empirical

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Literature Review
• Methodology
• Findings
• Discussion
• Conclusion

Literature-based

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Literature search strategy
• Critical literature review chapters
• Discussion
• Conclusion

Submitting your work

Submission for the assessment will be via the Dropbox in this learning room which will be created nearer to the submission deadlines. Please upload a file in Word or Open Office format. Please do not submit a file in any other format (e.g. as a Google or OneDrive doc/link) as these will not be accepted.