Assignment description

Assignment description

Preparing for the research phase

This assignment may be submitted in French or Spanish if you plan to write your research paper in that language instead of English.  It is designed to help you plan your research so that you can move right into reading and writing starting from next week.

Assignment tasks

This assignment consists of three tasks, to be uploaded together as a single document in the Assignments section of the classroom. The document should contain three sections as described below. This assignment is not graded; however it is a required course activity and you will receive feedback on your work.

1. Methodology:Update the short description (one or two paragraphs) of your research methodology which you included in your Module 2 assignment. Are there any changes in how you plan to conduct your research? Have you contacted any of the people you plan to interview? Have you obtained permission, if needed, to use any of the resources you have in mind? Please also update your draft list of primary and secondary resources and note whether you have been able to obtain all of them.
2. Timetable:Prepare a timetable for your research paper. Keep in mind that the deadline for submission of the completed research paper is Monday, 20th May, 2019 and work back from this. Plan to send your work to your tutor chapter by chapter, starting from the first week of the research phase. Following this, you should be able to send a near-final full draft to your tutor a week before the deadline, to allow time for final feedback and revisions. If you plan interviews, a questionnaire, or if you need time to obtain certain resources, you need to contact key people now.
3. Outline:Write up a draft outline of your paper, sketching out the main chapters you think should be included, and what you will cover in each chapter. Of course, this may change as you work on the project, but it can help you to organise your ideas and avoid discovering gaps in your coverage of the topic later on. For advice on how to write an outline, see the Writing Skills section in the Online Study Guide.

Before you start

Before you start, you may wish to consider updating or even revising your research proposal following the suggestions from course lecturers. Think about how to narrow down and focus your research objectives, if needed. Make sure that your goals are realistic given the short time frame for the research phase (4 weeks) and the word limit for the final paper (the limit is 4000 – 5000 words – excluding only the executive summary and reference list, and including footnotes).

It’s better to look at a specific question in depth rather than cover more questions, but only superficially. You might think of this research project as an opportunity to enhance your research and writing skills, and to demonstrate your level of understanding of what humanitarian diplomacy is about through systematic analysis of a particular case. Your research for this course might prepare the ground for more extensive and long-term research in the future; but for now, focus on realistic and attainable goals.

You are not required to re-submit your research proposal with the Module 8 assignment, but you may do so if you’d like to get further feedback from the lecturing team.

Guidelines and tutor role

As you work on this assignment, please pay attention to the following resources (all available from the top of the course outline on the left side of the classroom):

• IFRC Humanitarian Diplomacy Policy (available in ‘Resources’). Always keep this in mind, to ensure that your topic and approach fit within the definition and scope of humanitarian diplomacy.
• Course Research Guide. This provides guidance for the different stages of the research process, as well as sample papers from previous course groups.
• Online Study Guide. This covers topics like finding information online, writing skills, copying and pasting (plagiarism), and citations.

Even if you’ve already read the Course Research Guide, please read it again. It’s very important to ensure that you adhere to its requirements.

Your research aims to produce a formal research paper. This is different from an essay; it requires a strong methodological approach and it must be properly referenced. Note that all papers will be checked for plagiarism to ensure that they do not contain text which is copied from elsewhere. You will also need to adopt an appropriate writing style, for example, avoiding the use of first person when writing (see the ‘Writing style checklist’ at the end of the Course Research Guide for more tips).

Your tutor will be your main point of contact during the research phase and can help with these technical requirements, including:

• Focusing clearly your research questions and aims
• Understanding and approaching research and writing (methodology and resources, planning and following a timetable, planning interview questions, drafting an outline of the planned paper, citations, etc.)
• Discussing questions related to your topic with you, and/or putting you in touch with a course lecturer for advice on the content of your paper
• Reading draft chapters and commenting on the structure, argumentation, logic, information which should be added, etc.
• Your tutor is not expected to edit your paper for grammar or other language issues. We know that many course participants are not native speakers of the language they choose to write in, and we do not expect the language in the paper to be perfect; however, if the text is difficult to understand your tutor may recommend that you seek editing help from a friend or colleague who is a native speaker or at least writes well in your chosen language. Please keep in mind that your readers may not be native speakers of the language you have chosen, so your written paper needs to be of a high ‘universal’ standard – avoiding idiom and poor grammar.