Hello BUSN20019 students, a] First of all, students who are emailing me are still not reading the Moodle site carefully. I'm getting many emails that are completely in the wrong format...and some great emails from students who have read the Moodle site carefully by the way--so well done! There is also incredible carelessness in these emails at times...terrible spelling for example. At this stage of your degree, you should have learnt not to do this. These kind of mistakes will mean that you will not be able to write to a prospective employer and get a job...it is CRITICAL that you learn to write a great email... b] Secondly, the project itself. Students are asking "can I change my topic"? (yes, but read on), "is this topic OK?" (we can't really answer that, and that includes our lecturers, without knowing HOW you are going to handle your topic. A topic like "green financing for the mining industry" may sound good...but they may BE bad....if for example you don't have data for it. So, just because your tutor says to you "yes, the topic is good" doesn't mean the result will be good...because that depends on how you handle it. c] Many of you are worried and upset about the marks for the first assignment. This is only a 15% assignment. The key is that you improve from this point, and Assignment 1, Part 1 will quickly become irrelevant. So, let's think again about your project. FIrst of all, do you now understand what secondary data is? It is material that already exists, that you will aggregate (bring together) in some way, analyse in some systematic way. So just reading some articles, choosing some findings from some reports, and writing about it, does NOT mean you are doing a secondary data analysis, even if the reports contain things like "there was a 48% increase in green financing in the mining industry in 2014". That's something you can include in your literature review...but it's not doing secondary data analysis. As I've said before, for you the 'easiest' way to do a secondary data research is to FIRST find some data...and then build the project around it. Professional researchers do it the other way around...they think of a topic and then try to find data that helps to address that topic or question. Now, you should NOT do it that way, because finding data is really quite hard for newcomers to research. So you need to find the data first. I've given you some sites where you can find suitable data, and the video also suggests how you can build your own data from two different sources. We will do the simple one first...that is, finding a single dataset that will be adequate for making a project out of. Imagine if you found a data set that had 400 mining companies in it, with some columns in the excel sheet that represented things like how large the company was in tonnes of coal they mines...how many employees, when the company was founded (started), and finally, whether they use green financing or not. Now the things I just mentioned are variables. Some companies were founded in 2001, some companies in 2010. The number VARIES. So it is a variable. If you had this dataset you could build a number of different projects out of it...in fact infinite number of projects. One project could be built around the question "Do older mining companies use green financing more?" But you could also answer the question "Do larger mining companies use green financing more?" Let's say you chose the second question... You would then go into the scholarly literature and try and find some articles about mining companies, size of companies, types of financing used based on size....and finally green financing... If you found some articles you could build an article that talked (hopefully) how the literature shows that larger firms use different kinds of financing because of x, y and z. You could then say something like "larger firms tend to innovate more (Smith, 2000) in their financing choice because of the greater availability of resources, and their willingness to take risks..." And then you would move to your research question... (Do larger mining companies use green financing more?" ) and then you would describe your methodology. Students normally don't understand methodology very well, and do quite a bad job of it, even though it is really not that complicated. It's almost like a recipe. Many methodology sections in research articles are almost the same...because it follows certain formulas. You really need to revise your BUSN20016 textbook to make sure you understand what to put here. A good methods section will impress your marker. OK, let's turn to the other kind of secondary data sets you could use...and these require you to do some 'building' of the dataset first....rather than just using one that is already built for you... Let’s say you find a list of large mining companies, listed by name…let’s say the top 400 mining companies in Australia. You could paste these 400 companies in a column in Excel, for example. Then you could either take a random sample of this 400 (say 40 of them) and go into their websites and find out all sorts of data, such as size, number of employees…even stockmarket performance is available for all listed companies. You could build extra columns of data in your Excel sheet that had these variables in it…a column for size, a column for number of employees etc… If you could find SOMEWHERE a source of information showing whether these companies used green financing or not…then you would be in the same position you were before. You would have a dataset, which you could then use to build your project. The only difference is, you built it yourself from other sources of data. Finally, as I have explained, you COULD do a qualitative research project in which your data sources were (say) BLOGS, websites, even articles… However, please revise carefully what QUALITATIVE research means. It doesn’t mean simply reading the material, writing and referencing. It would take too long to explain here what a qualitative secondary data research project would look like, but if you do want to take the approach you NEED to read up on qualitative research so you understand what it means. It is more complicated than quantitative research. Finally, I want to say a few more words on topic. You are doing a business masters degree, either in accounting, management, HR, or marketing. You REALLY should be doing your project in the specialisation you are doing at CQU, i.e. if you are studying accounting it should be accounting, if you are doing marketing, it should be marketing. Why? Because it is EASIER. That is, you KNOW more about this topic than you do about a discipline you have not studied. Plus this unit is supposed to be a capstone unit, building on the knowledge you have learnt here at CQU…not the knowledge you gained somewhere else (e.g. in your undergraduate engineering degree). One of the harder things to do in this project is to link your topic to a model or a theory. By that we mean, what are the broader implications, what kind of knowledge can be drawn from your study, or your research question, that applies outside that PRECISE research question. So if you have a study on ‘green financing’ and size of mining company, what does it mean beyond mining…and beyond green financing. For example, as I suggested before, is the real reason there is a relationship between size of company and how much a company uses green financing to do with available resources…as in money. Is the large company less risk averse, that is more prepared to take risks? There is probably a theory there for that. I put the terms (in quote marks) "firm size" "risk averse" into Google scholar and found some literature on just that subject… Don’t worry TOO much about this…this is not critical. It just is one way to improve your marks. Some of the main areas you SHOULD worry about are: A] being careful. Too many assignments failed to include a section, ignored a major simple requirement (“five references” “one page”), and were untidy, with inconsistent referencing etc… So in other words, unprofessional. And these things are in fact EASY to get right. They don’t require mastery of the English language. B] make sure you have a data set, have identified the variables, have a plan on how to analyse it, and address issues like population, sampling and so on…stuff you will find straight in your BUSN20016 textbook. C] Try and organise your literature review so that it moves from the broad field to a focus on your specific area at the end.