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DISSERTATION RESEARCH AND WRITING FOR CONSTRUCTION STUDENTS
The dissertation or thesis can often seem like an overwhelming and insurmountable obstacle to students - unless you have a comprehensive book that guides through the process sequentially. In this third edition of the text, Shamil Naoum once again takes the reader and novice researcher diligently through the research journey. The contents of the book come out of the author's experience of supervising undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations, which showed a need for a text to guide students on basic research techniques and to illustrate how a thesis could be structured and written. The first edition was published in 1998, the second in 2007, and the publication of this third edition is testimony that the text has stood the test of time.
Dissertation Research and Writing for Construction Students shows students how to prepare and execute research and produce a thesis. Naoum sees dissertation research as a process with a sequence of learnable activities; it's an approach which works really well with novice researchers. In my 22 years' experience of supervising students, around half are anxious about undertaking a dissertation simply because they understand neither what is involved nor what is required. It is the fear of the unknown; the shock of the new. By breaking the process into three clear phases; preparing the ground, research design and analysis of the results and...