Freelance Writing and Research

Evaluations

If you decide to take up research as part of your lifestyle and you do it on a contract basis then you will inevitably come up against evaluations. These are often a built in requirement of both voluntary community projects that rely on private funders and some Government funded projects. Ideally this evaluation should be ongoing throughout the life of the project and clever project managers build this into their funding bids.

If you get brought in at the end of the project and are required to do an overall evaluation and produce a report then you could find yourself with a can of worms if the monitoring and evaluation that was supposed to take place during the life of the project has either not been done or been done badly.

Evaluation reports are often different to other research reports because evaluations are usually measured by outcomes and the outcomes are seen to be achieved when a certain number of indicators have been fulfilled. If, for example, you were evaluating a project and looking at good practice then there should be an outcome delineating that, e.g. inter-agency working, which might be measured by whether people attend meetings, how well they share information and whether they can work together to solve a problem - thse are the indicators. If the indicators are met then in the project's terms it has achieved its own vision of good practice.

Your job as an evaluator is to take what is known as an outcomes approach, ultimately the indicators and outcomes should reflect the project's original aims. So if you had a project involving a children's charity for example then one of your aims could well be that there is an integrated approach to meeting children's needs - one way of assessing whether this aim has been met is to look at indicators of good interagency working practice. Hope all this makes sense if you are working on an evaluation and finding it tough, then leave a comment or use the contact form and I will get back to you. 

Structuring a Research Paper

At some point in your academic studies you will be required to produce a research paper. If you are a sociology or cultural studies student then that research paper will probably involve some kind of empirical research. Below is a mock research paper proposal laying out the different things that you will have to look at if you are required to produce such a proposal.

Research Proposal

Research Question:

The rationale for this research was an interest in what motivated mature students to pursue a course of study at University. The hypothesis was derived: that mature male students had very different motives for wanting to study than their younger counterparts. From this hypothesis the research question was developed and is shown below.

Do mature students have different motives for undertaking a degree course than their younger counterparts, and if so, what are those motives?

Aims:

• To discover whether the financial situation of a student is a significant factor in their decision to apply for University.

• To assess whethe mature male students' decision to study is related to their financial situation.

• To ascertain whether mature male students have a different motivation for studying to those of younger students.

Approach:

The research will draw on relevant literature relating to higher education and the motives of students seeking to further their education at University. The study will take a quantitative approach and this will be implemented through survey research.

Methods:

The research instrument will be a structured questionnaire. The study-sampling frame will draw on a non-probability purposive sample of students, i.e. looking at specific members of a population for an identified purpose. Conceptual indicators will be motive, finance and educational patterns, these will be operationalised through the use of different types of questions e.g. multi choice and scaling. Questions relating to reliability and validity will hopefully be addressed in the initial stages. The questionnaire will be piloted and any necessary adjustments made to the questions.

Ethical Considerations

An ethics form will be submitted for approval and once this has been dealt with the research will proceed as above. All respondents will remain anonymous and the information received will be confidential. Findings from the research will only be used in the context of the current project. All participants will be offered the opportunity to view the finished report.

Writing A Research Report

Everyone who undertakes a research project will eventually have to analyse the data which they have collected and then present their findings, analysis and recommendations or policy recommendations (depending on who the research is for) into a formal report. This article will give an overview of the generally accepted structure of such a report.

A research report should contain a number of different sections; what I propose to do here is to list the structure of a research report and then go through each section indivdiually. Most formal research reports will contain the following sections:

1. Executive Summary
2. Background or Introduction
3. Research Objectives and Method
4. Key findings and discussion
5. Conclusion and Recommendations
6. Appendices

Executive Summary

The executive summary contains all the sections (other than the appendices) that are in the main report. Each section is a brief summary of what is in the main report - other than the findings and discussion; in the executive summary this would be a summary of key findings. Local councils and other government organizations often have a facility where people who want to know what the research was about but don't want to read the full report, can download the executive summary.

At the end of the executive summary there would normally be an acknowledgements page thanking those who took part in the research and often those who funded the research or who contributed in any way to the project.

Introduction

All the sections in the main report are an extended version of what is in the executive summary.

This section gives a summary of the background to the project, some background literature and why the report was needed. The introduction should also include the current project and the project's aims.

Approach

This section details the approach that the project took to data collection and analysis. A structured, postal questionnaire and analysis would be a quantitative approach to the project and involve statistical analysis. Focus groups, unstructured or semi-structured interviews and participant observation are generally all qualitative approaches. Sometimes however, a quantitative approach may involve focus groups or semi-structured interviews. Some projects that I have worked on use both quantitative and qualitative methods, the executive summary of that report can be found here.

Method

This section is about the actual methods used e.g. a postal questionnaire was sent out to the following agencies.... out of 100 questionnaires sent out 50 were returned giving a 50% response rate. The data from the questionnaires was then entered into a statistical package for analysis. OR

Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with three project leaders and then a focus group was arranged for all those who benefitted from the project. The data from the interviews and the focus group was then examined for common themes.

You would then give an example of the questions that were asked or what the schedule was for the focus group. There would then be a section on analysis saying briefly how the data was analysed.

Key Findings and Discussion

This would give a brief summary of the findings of the research (almost identical with that found in the executive summary) under the headings that arose during analysis - for example if you were undertaking a project into women who worked from home two of your headings might be: Time management for work at home mothers and Setting up a home office.

Conclusion and Recommendations

This will be a summing up of the project and any recommendations that may have evolved from the findings and discussion, e.g. you might recommend that sustainable funding would increase the likely future success of the project if this has come up as an issue during the research.

Take a look at the report on  BME Groups and Meeting the Workforce Challenge linked to above.

How Much Research? It is not often that I underestimate how much time will be spent researching information but it is very easy to do and then you lose out. Like most freelancers when I am deciding how much I should charge for writing articles I try to allow some of the cost for research. If I am charging $0.02 a word I cannot afford to spend a lot of time researching for the article. Yesterday however,

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