ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines options to help choose the research methodology for students' dissertation. It shows that research is a complex and ‘messy’ business with lots of questions and issues to consider. The chapter aims to offer essential information to help students feel confident to develop a research strategy suited to their research question(s). A research paradigm is a set of common beliefs and shared agreements between scientists as to how to understand and solve a problem. Research paradigms are best understood in relation to the philosophical positions that define the focus of each paradigm and the key research issues they seek to address. Case-study research can be well suited to an undergraduate dissertation where the main objective is to collect a wide range of information on a specific subject or a contextualised problem in order to uncover the essential social, cultural, economic or political factors underlying the subject/problem.
