Methodology / Research Approach

http://www.skillsyouneed.com/learn/research-methods.html

Ontology. How you, the researcher, view the world and the assumptions that you make about the nature of the world and of reality.

Epistemology. The assumptions that you make about the best way of investigating the world and about reality.

Methodology. The way that you group together your research techniques to make a coherent picture.

Methods and techniques. What you actually do in order to collect your data and carry out your investigations.

The kind of data I will predominantly be using for my dissertation and the method of collecting it:

Qualitative data is about the nature of the thing investigated and tends to be words rather than numbers.

Secondary data is published by someone else, usually a public body or company, although it may also consist of archive material such as historical records. A researcher using such data needs to generate new and original insights into it.