What Follows Is an Example of How an Empirical Msc Master Thesis May Be Structured

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Part 2. Literature review[5] of the topic.

The objective of the second part of the Introduction is to make sure that your contribution to the research field is relevant in the sense that it builds on what has been worked on previously[6].

In order to do that, you should:

- provide a comprehensive panoramic of what is known about a topic and of how that knowledge has been gained (i.e., thanks to which research questions, methods, data analysis strategies…), this is what is known as ‘literature review’, and

- bring to the readers’ attention those still-to-be-known issues (research gap) that should be explored in further studies

Finally, in Part 3. Presenting the research gap you will present precisely one of such still-to-be-known issues as the focus of your own study that you will explain in the Method section.

The literature review in Empirical papers does not need to present as structured an analysis of the published studies as Conceptual papers. Since the focus of the paper is the empirical study and the conclusions to be extracted from it, the literature review included in the Introduction should be conceived as a contextualizing tool, designed to help the reader understand the meaningfulness of the contribution that your study will bring to the research field and to practitioners.

What is important is that the literature review you include in your introduction presents not only the synthesis of what reviewed studies have found but also your personal view as a researcher[7]. Such personal view should take the form of an evaluation (i.e., explicit expression of agreement or criticism) that needs to be expressed in adequately accurate and strategic phrasing, avoiding too emphatic expressions[8].

Such evaluation should focus on the issues that, from the perspective that you will apply to your own study, should be addressed differently or should need to be addressed (in the case none of the revised articles has dealt with it at all). And, among such issues should be the specific one that will be the focus of your own study

Part 3. Presenting the research gap

After presenting what we already know (and still do not know) about the topic under study, we should explicitly present which of the issues (from all the ones commented on) that would still require further study is the one that you will focus on in your study. When we do this it is important that we emphasize why it is important for us to learn more about precisely that issue (and not others), justifying its relevance from the point of view of research and/or from the point of view of the management practice.

This part should finish with an explicit presentation of the aim of the study and the specific research objectives of the study. Continuing with our example:

It is necessary, therefore, to complement what we already know about risk management in supply chain management with information regarding issue X [the focus of your study] since... [justify why this would be relevant/necessary including authors to support your argument].

The study we present in this paper aims to do just that. More specifically, we aim to... The specific research objectives are:

- [include research objective 1]

- [include research objective 2][9]

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Regarding the first research objective, we will aim to confirm or refute the following hypotheses:

- Hypothesis 1

- Hypothesis 2

Regarding the second research objective, we will aim to confirm or refute the following hypotheses:

- Hypothesis 1

- Hypothesis 2[10]

- Method (requirement)

Here you should make explicit the kind of research design you have used. For instance:

In order to fulfill the objectives of our study we have designed a descriptive-interpretative study based on the analysis of two cases.

- Participants (if people) / sample (if organizations)

Here you should include the number of people / organizations that have been part of your sample, and provide the necessary characterization information.

- Data collecting instruments / Measures

In this section information regarding the instruments used to collect information (e.g. surveys, questionnaires, semi-structured interviews…) should be included.

- Procedure

In this section you need to report in an orderly fashion the sequence of steps or phases you have implemented from the moment of the design of the study until the moment when you have elaborated the MSc Master Thesis report.

In order to help the reader get a clear picture of what you have done you may represent such phases with a figure such as the following:

[pic 1]

- Data analysis

Here you should explain the process you have followed to process and analyze the data collected. Issues such as inter-judge reliability (in qualitative studies) should be referred to here. Please check this with your tutor.

- Results (requirement)

You may have obtained many results but not all of them should necessarily be included, only the most relevant results should be included. Your tutor will help you decide which results should be emphasized and which could be left out.

Results need to be presented in such a way that their organization allows a clear answer to the hypothesis or the objectives of the study. Tables and/or figures should be used so as to present information in an adequately synthetic way. The information included in those tables/figures should be described in as much detail as necessary.

Please remember that this section presents ‘a picture’ of what you have learned, the interpretation of what that picture means should be included in the Discussion section.

- Results concerning research objective 1