How to Do Your Research Project: A Guide for Students

Citation

Thomas, G. (2025). How to Do Your Research Project: A Guide for Students (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Chapter Summary

The fifth edition has ten chapters, a glossary and a reference list, in about 336 pages. The chapters follow the order of a dissertation or thesis, so the book can be read alongside a project. Each chapter ends with an overview, suggestions for further reading and a checklist. The preface lists what is new: revised DIY activities in every chapter, discussion of where artificial intelligence helps and where it misleads, more on organising a literature review, and a reorganisation in which the earlier single chapter on research design is now two chapters.

Chapter 1: Your Introduction

Explains what an introduction does and builds it around the research question. Sections deal with the point of the research, thinking of an idea, four kinds of question, descriptive and explanatory questions, feasibility, kinds of evidence, and thinking critically about evidence.

Chapter 2: Project Management, Ethics and Getting Clearance

Covers the structure of a dissertation, timelines and time management, the stresses of research, access and working with a supervisor. A long section on ethics treats ethical review, levels of risk, risk assessment and management, undergraduate-level and postgraduate-level clearance, social media in research and care for participants and for the researcher.

Chapter 3: The Literature Review, Part 1: Searching

Concerns finding and judging sources: primary and secondary sources, source quality, critical awareness, note-taking and reference managers, Google Scholar and snowballing, a new section on AI tools, library databases, official statistics, theses and referencing systems.

Chapter 4: The Literature Review, Part 2: Developing a Narrative

Argues that a review should tell a story rather than list sources. It covers scoping, mind maps, scaffolding a review, systematic reviews, how much detail to give, and reframing the research question into a final form.

Chapters 5–7: Methodology, Parts 1–3

Part 1, Deciding on an Approach, deals with paradigms (positivism and interpretivism), qualitative and quantitative approaches, ontology and epistemology, and the path from purposes to questions to data gathering. Part 2, Designing Your Research, covers fixed and emergent designs, sampling, variables, reliability, validity, generalisation, positionality, triangulation and writing the methodology chapter. Part 3, The Design Frames, surveys action research, case study, interpretative phenomenological analysis, ethnography and related approaches, evaluation, experiment, longitudinal and cross-sectional studies and surveys, comparative study, mixing designs and postmodernism.

Chapter 8: Data Gathering

Presents tools grouped by whether they mainly produce words, words or numbers, or numbers: interviews, diaries and reflective journals, focus groups, document interrogation and social media; questionnaires, observation and image-based data; and measurements, tests and official statistics.

Chapter 9: How to Analyse and Discuss the Information You Gather

Covers analysing words (coding, grounded theory, thick description, discourse and content analysis, computer tools) and analysing numbers (kinds of numbers, Excel, descriptive, relational and inferential statistics), then how to discuss the analysis through synthesis and theorising.

Chapter 10: Concluding and Writing Up

Deals with the conclusion, abstract and title, the final shape of the report, voice and style, inclusive writing, plagiarism including AI and plagiarism, presentation and editing.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–4: Question and literature

• Research question: the foundation of the project; different kinds of question lead to different projects.
• Ethical clearance and risk assessment: review of a project before data collection.
• Literature review as narrative: a scaffolded story that leads to a final research question.

Chapters 5–7: Methodology

• Paradigms: frameworks for thinking about the social world, including positivism and interpretivism.
• Fixed and emergent designs: whether the design is set in advance or develops during the study.
• Design frames: overall structures such as case study, ethnography and experiment.

Chapters 8–10: Data, analysis and writing

• Data-gathering tools: methods grouped by whether they produce words, numbers or both.
• Coding and statistics: approaches to analysing words and numbers.
• Discussion and synthesis: relating the analysis back to the question and to theory.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Follows the shape of a project. The chapter sequence matches the sections of a dissertation, and each chapter shows where the reader stands in the project.
• Broad coverage of design frames and tools. Chapter 7 gives each design frame its own section, and Chapter 8 groups tools by the kind of data they yield, which helps in choosing methods that fit a question.
• Practical supports. Each chapter ends with an overview, further reading and a checklist, and the preface lists revised DIY activities in every chapter.
• Written for both levels. The preface says it is not pitched at either undergraduates or postgraduates and is aimed at students in education and the social sciences generally.

Limitations

• Breadth over depth. One book spans the whole project, so statistical inference and specialist qualitative methods receive introductory treatment and a dedicated text is needed for depth.
• Chapter numbering changed. Methodology now spans three chapters, so references to the previous edition's chapters do not map directly.
• Newness of the AI material. AI tools appear as a new section in Chapter 3 and in the discussion of plagiarism; institutional rules on their use vary and should be checked locally.

Where It Fits in the Course

Thomas is one of two first-project guides in this course. Bell, Waters and Johnson's Doing Your Research Project covers similar ground for first-time researchers; either works as the core handbook for a dissertation, and reading a chapter of the other helps when an explanation does not click. Thomas's separate chapters on approach, design and design frames make it a useful bridge to larger texts.

Once a project is under way the course offers fuller treatments. Creswell and Guetterman's Educational Research covers quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods with annotated published studies, and Cohen, Manion and Morrison's Research Methods in Education is a comprehensive reference. For postgraduate work, Tisdell, Merriam and Stuckey-Peyrot's Qualitative Research goes deeper into qualitative design, and Murnane and Willett's Methods Matter addresses causal inference in evaluating educational programmes.

How to Use This Book

The book is for students in education and the applied social sciences doing a first research project or dissertation, at undergraduate or early postgraduate level; no earlier research experience is assumed.

A practical plan: read Chapters 1 and 2 first to settle a working question, a timetable and the ethics process. Work through Chapters 3 and 4 while searching, returning to the question as ideas sharpen. Read Chapters 5, 6 and 7 together before choosing methods, so that the data-gathering tools of Chapter 8 follow from the design. Skim Chapters 9 and 10 before collecting data so the analysis and write-up requirements are known in advance. Do the DIY activities as they arise, use the checklists as a project audit, and discuss the guidance with a supervisor, since the preface notes that tutors differ and advises listening to one's own tutor.