Anticipated technical problems

Experience has shown that there are always surprises. Therefore, it is best to print the master’s thesis several days before the deadline and pay attention to proper formatting when proofreading.

Writing a research paper is a complex and (for the author) new task. Particularly problematic is that the complexity is often drastically underestimated. What initially seems simple can become very difficult and time consuming when the time comes to write the thesis.

This is one more reason to plan the time required for the individual steps and chapters (use of milestones). This way it becomes evident whether your pace is sufficient to complete the work within the given time frame. When scheduling, please give yourself a buffer, as experience has shown that deadlines often cannot be met.

As pointed out several times, repeated self-critical reviews are absolutely necessary in writing a high-quality thesis. The quality of a work usually increases with time, through the effort and critique that you receive from the people that you have asked for feedback prior to submitting your thesis. Therefore, you should try to have written the thesis completed three weeks before the due date. This allows enough time to tweak and improve your thesis (and thereby your grade).

The often attempted feat of writing through the night and having tens of friends correct and revise at the same time, scrambling to find a replacement toner cartridge as the sun rises, and running to the nearest copy shop to have your thesis bound in record time rarely has a happy ending. Most of the time, inconsistencies and errors are so bad that the grade will be very unpleasant.

Principally we welcome theses that are developed through suggestion by and cooperation with corporate partners. Students who choose to go this route should note this is somewhat of a balancing act. The interests of academic research and practice are related, but not identical. The thesis is graded in terms of how well you work out an interesting and relevant problem and answer.

Experience has shown that there are always practitioners who would like the master’s thesis to only solve a single concrete problem and are not interested in a generalization of the results. It is your responsibility to ensure that the work is of general interest.

It depends. On the one hand, working empirically is usually more work; it asks for the acquisition of specific know-how and skills (with regard to qualitative and quantitative methods of collecting and analyzing data) in addition to a good overview about the relevant literature. On the other hand, working empirically has some major advantages: It gives you much more freedom in choosing a research question, as most questions call for empirical work to be answered properly. Furthermore, writing a well-crafted empirical thesis is actually much easier than writing a very good conceptual thesis. For conceptual pieces of research, the thoughts expressed and ideas presented need to be extremely sharp and creative to really contribute to the literature. Just summarizing existing literature would not be sufficient. Even very experienced researchers often fail to publish conceptual work in highly ranked journals because of a lack of conceptual clearness and newness of their ideas. Consequently, it will be much easier with empirically founded theses to proof their contribution.

Requirement for an empirical master’s thesis is an evidence of relevant knowledge because we want that you know what lies ahead of you. In empirical work the golden rule is that you have to put in some thought in your approach in advance, and not just “get started”. Errors that happen here by being too hasty are often irreversible.

Especially in empirical studies, an "Explanation of the world" will not be possible. You should therefore formulate the problem so that you can thoroughly and comprehensively examine it. If the topic is too big and wide, the work is almost inevitably trite and shallow. Ideal would be a "narrow" topic that you can analyze thoroughly and in depth.

You should first ask yourself whether you want it to be exploratory (usually smaller and not suitable for generalization) or hypothesis-testing (larger, quantitative).

It is very important to document the procedure accurately and comment critically. When conducting empirical research, there is often no ideal solution and you must make compromises due for practical reasons. The researcher almost always, through personal decisions, affects the results (through questions in the interview, analysis, interpretation, etc.) - this is perfectly normal and legitimate. However, it is essential that all actions, all ambiguities, all interventions etc. are disclosed and explained, so that the reader can understand this.

For quantitative work, it is often tempting to use every available statistic. However, writing an empirical work is not a competition of data. It's not about using as many procedures as possible, but using the correct ones. In extreme cases, it is only a simple count of frequency. The basic rule is that you should always consider what the evaluation of data contributes in terms of answering the research questions.

When presenting results (i.e., empirical findings), it has proven to be useful to just show the bare results, i.e. presented as a table or graph. In the text you can then explain some of the key points (what is the average finding?) and finally, something that is often forgotten, interpret! Interpretation means that you try to describe what this result means in terms of the research questions, how it is classified, whether or not the result surprises you, how this has an effect on the theory, etc. Of course we also explain the limits of interpretation, thus presenting "alternative explanations".

Interviews are recorded and later (with information about interviewee and date) transcribed – this way you can make a meaningful reference to statements made by the interviewee in your thesis (with reference to the appendix, interviewee, and page). Confidentiality of course is essential. No personal data may be made available to third parties.

Do not make the mistake of underestimating the demands of qualitative interviews. They vary greatly from normal everyday conversations. Be sure to familiarize yourself with the relevant methods.

Especially in empirical work, clear ethical principles are important. Although we are not in the same situation as physicians or psychologists, who have to constantly worry, there are problems that can arise.

A guiding rule is that you cannot harm third parties, and must not abuse their trust. If you have promised respondents, for example, that after completing your investigation you will send them a brief summary of your findings, then you should do so.

The following formal requirements are “suggested requirements”, so you have some margin of discretion. Please use these responsibly.

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