A Complete Research Project, End to End
Walk one examined master's project from its aim to its last sentence, using the artefacts that made it. The apparatus turns out to be sounder than the document written from it, and that asymmetry is the lesson.
What survived, and what did not
The library's first 243 pages describe research apparatus without being able to show any: slides about instruments with no instrument, ethics obligations with no consent document, an analysis vocabulary with no dataset. This project is the exception. Almost the whole chain that produced it survived, and can be walked in both directions.
The study surveys change management from an entrepreneurial perspective, submitted as Part A of a two-part project. Everything below is student work and its supporting apparatus, not teaching material. The thesis passed examination; the defects recorded are defects in artefacts, and nothing here adjudicates a mark.
THE EIGHT ARTEFACTS, AND WHAT EACH ONE FIXES IN PLACE
| Artefact | Format as supplied | What it makes checkable |
|---|---|---|
| The thesis | 62 pages, 11,741 words | The argument and every published number |
| The instrument as issued | Six-page image-based PDF, from the form's editing view | What respondents were asked, and their options |
| The questionnaire as a working document | Word-processor document, 72 revisions | An earlier wording of the same questions |
| The participant information sheet | 621 words, two pages | What participants were told before consenting |
| The raw response file | CSV, four columns, 204 physical rows | The stored answers to questions 1 to 4 |
| The analysis workbook | Ten sheets, eight pivot tables, eight charts, no formulas | Every tabulation and chart in the thesis |
| The project schedule | Scheduling-application file, plus its printed chart | The plan the work was meant to follow |
| A project completion report | Belongs to a different project | An ethics-closure form — for another study |
Formats and counts are verified from the files' own metadata. None is a requirement or a norm.
What the project set out to do
This is the apparatus fourteen weeks of teaching material describe and never display in one place: an aim, objectives, a research question and hypotheses, from a single document.
The research aims to understand the appropriate change management models for entrepreneurs to employ to inculcate change management processes in their organisation.
- "analyse the importance of change management and the use of change management tools to shape organisational change processes"
- "analyse the various change management models that could be used by entrepreneurs from their perspective"
- "define the actions and behavioural traits to be inculcated by entrepreneurs to communicate changes to employees"
Three objectives, quoted exactly: two begin analyse, one begins define. Above them sits one research question with two clauses; below them, a null and an alternative hypothesis. The teaching source's requirement is a concise statement of one of hypothesis, question, aim or objectives. This thesis supplies all four.
The hypotheses are propositions: that there is no benefit to entrepreneurial success, and that change management is beneficial for achieving it. Neither names a variable to be measured, a comparison to be made, or a criterion for rejection. No test statistic, significance level or decision rule appears in the document.
The apparatus it built
Five artefacts, described by what they contain
Eight questions, all compulsory
Four demographic and four substantive questions, every one required and single-choice. Thirty-seven response options; no free text, no "other", no "prefer not to say". Consent is a sentence in the header, not a tick box.
Eleven elements on two pages
Purpose; a five-minute burden estimate; voluntariness with three consent propositions; withdrawal and anonymity, each with its limit stated; benefit and risk; five-year retention on a secure server; researcher, supervisor and committee contacts.
Fifty complete rows, then a gap
Four columns, 204 physical rows. Rows 2 to 51 hold fifty responses with no blank cell, then 148 empty rows, then five further rows outside every tabulation — excluded by a range boundary, not a recorded decision.
Ten sheets and no formulas
Eight pivot tables and eight charts, and not one formula in any cell. Seven charts read their sheet's pivot table; one reads a hand-typed copy of the counts, which agrees exactly but would never refresh.
Twenty-nine rows, sound arithmetic
Eight summary tasks, twenty sub-tasks, four milestones, a three-level work breakdown. Twenty-two of twenty-three durations match a five-day calendar and every summary rolls up correctly.
The instrument carries ten demonstrable defects, recorded rather than repaired: an importance scale that is not monotonic, overlapping boundaries on three questions, an experience question merging two things it cannot separate, and no opt-out. They are set out at the survey instrument, displayed, the workbook's defect at building an analysis workbook, and the excluded rows at data screening.
What it collected, and what it concluded
Fifty respondents answered all eight questions, with no blank cell anywhere — a direct consequence of every question being marked required. Eight pivot tables count them, one per question.
THE EIGHT TABULATIONS, AS THE WORKBOOK PRINTS THEM
| Question | Counts, largest category first | Base |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Age band | 19 / 17 / 8 / 6 | 50 |
| 2 — Gender | 23 / 22 / 5 | 50 |
| 3 — Experience band | 17 / 12 / 11 / 5 / 5 | 50 |
| 4 — Enterprise size | 16 / 10 / 9 / 8 / 7 | 50 |
| 5 — Importance of change management | 21 / 14 / 7 / 5 / 3 | 50 |
| 6 — Preferred change model | 18 / 11 / 11 / 7 / 3 | 50 |
| 7 — Top process priority | 15 / 13 / 11 / 6 / 5 | 50 |
| 8 — Communication aspect | 12 / 12 / 11 / 8 / 7 | 50 |
Every tabulation was recomputed from the fifty raw rows and matches category by category; all eight total exactly 50. Verified. These are this study's counts, not a wider finding.
The conclusions are modest in places and expansive in others. Thirty-five of the fifty — the top two categories on question 5, named explicitly as an aggregation — put change management tools at very important or must be implemented, reported as 70 per cent. Three respondents, 6 per cent, said not important. Both survive checking. The headline recommendation is something else: a hybrid model combining three of the five.
How the artefacts connect, and what that lets you check
- Instrument
- Raw file
- Dataset
- Pivot table
- Chart
- Thesis sentence
That is the chain, and its links are the artefacts. It is complete for the four demographic questions and one link short for the four substantive ones, because the raw CSV holds only questions 1 to 4. Of the 400 responses collected, the raw export preserves 200. The other 200 exist in one place: the first sheet of the workbook.
Five checks that are impossible when the apparatus is missing
- Whether a percentage in the prose is the percentage the counts produce — which needs the dataset and the tabulation, not the chart.
- Whether the base is the one a reader would assume: seven of these eight pivot tables have grand totals switched off.
- Which rows entered a count — visible only because each pivot cache declares its source range and record count.
- Whether the instrument could ever have measured what the hypotheses are about.
- Whether a permission granted in one document survived into the version fielded — the questionnaire invites a skip on question 6, the issued form marks it required, and all fifty answered.
Every one of those checks exists because the material survived, and that is the limit on what it means. These are findings about one project that published its whole apparatus — not evidence about research in general, and not transferable to work that publishes less, where none of the checks can be run.
The honest assessment
What this project does well, specifically
- Its method chapter describes the analysis exactly — pivot tables and bar, column and pie charts — and the workbook contains precisely that.
- All eight tabulations are arithmetically correct against the raw rows: nothing missing, nothing duplicated, no count out by one.
- The 70 per cent claim names its own aggregation rather than presenting combined categories as one measure.
- The information sheet carries six of seven applicable ethical protections, with the limits of anonymity and withdrawal stated rather than glossed.
- The schedule's arithmetic is sound: durations match a five-day calendar and every summary rolls up.
Where the document falls short
- The conceptual framework draws no relationship between the independent and dependent variables.
- No question measures that dependent variable in any form — not revenue, growth, survival or self-assessed success.
- The sampling paragraph contradicts itself within two sentences, and calls random a recruitment the information sheet describes as referral through colleagues.
- The analysis is wholly descriptive and the thesis never says so: no test, significance level, confidence interval or measure of association appears.
- One limitation is acknowledged and it is external; sample size, recruitment and the unmeasured variable go unmentioned.
- Fourteen of sixty-four references are never cited, no pilot is recorded, and no response rate is computable.
One further defect is large enough to have its own page. Six published figures were traced from question to sentence; five survive and one does not — a percentage the counts do not produce, repeated in a second chapter, carried into a derived total, and contradicted by the chart printed alongside it. See tracing a figure back to its source.
The objective audit, and the root of both failures
WHAT WAS SET OUT, AND WHAT THE DOCUMENT DEMONSTRABLY DID
| Set out | What was done | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Objective 1 — the importance of change management and the use of its tools | Question 5 asked how important the tools are; fifty responses tabulated and correctly reported twice | Delivered. Importance was asked and answered; use was not — no question asks whether anyone has used a tool |
| Objective 2 — the various models entrepreneurs could use | Question 6 asked which of five defined models is most suitable; correctly tabulated | Delivered as an analysis; the conclusion exceeds it. The hybrid recommendation is the headline finding and no question asked about it. |
| Objective 3 — define the actions and traits for communicating change | Questions 7 and 8, both correctly tabulated | Partly delivered. Question 7's percentages are misreported, and the study ranks pre-written options rather than defining a trait |
| H0 — no benefit to entrepreneurial success | No statistic, criterion, threshold or comparison; the evidence is descriptive frequencies and a literature review | Not delivered. No hypothesis test was performed |
| H1 — change management is beneficial for entrepreneurial success | As above; its variable is never measured | Not delivered |
Derived count, this library's audit of one thesis.
The sentence claiming the hypothesis result turns on itself, quoted exactly: "The primary and secondary findings together led to rejection of the null hypothesis as there is no benefit offered by the change management processes in entrepreneurial success as per entrepreneurial perspective." The clause after as restates the null hypothesis as printed in chapter 1. As written, the document rejects the null on the ground that the null is true.
Both undelivered items are hypotheses, and both fail for one reason. They are about entrepreneurial success, and nothing in the project measures entrepreneurial success. Question 4 measures enterprise size, which is not the same thing and is nowhere offered as one.
The conceptual framework shows the same absence in another form: a radial diagram with the independent variable at the centre and its two components around it, and the dependent variable in a separate box with no connector, no arrow and no line to anything. It depicts the composition of one variable, not the relationship between two — and the relationship it omits is the one the hypotheses assert. See independent and dependent variables.
What to carry forward
- The value of this project is not its topic or its findings. It is that the whole chain survived, which is what makes every check above possible.
- The apparatus was better than the write-up: instrument sound enough to field, data captured completely, every tabulation and chart correct — and the errors entered when numbers were retyped into sentences.
- Audit what your own draft set out to do. One of five fully delivered is this thesis's result and a method you can run on yours.
- When a hypothesis goes undelivered, look for the unmeasured variable before the analysis.
- A data-integrity check that only inspects the spreadsheet would have found nothing wrong here. Check the sentences too.
Frequently asked questions
Is this project a model I should copy?
Copy the apparatus, not the numbers. Keeping the instrument as issued, a complete dataset, the tabulations behind each figure and a plan you can compare against your own file dates is what made every check on this page possible. The sample of fifty, the five-minute burden estimate and the eight-question instrument are one project's choices for one project's question.
Why does it matter that the raw file holds only four of the eight questions?
It means the four questions the findings rest on have no independent raw record. Their responses exist in exactly one place, the first sheet of the workbook, so a reader can check the tabulation against the dataset but cannot check the dataset against anything. Keeping the untouched export of every question, separate from the file you analyse in, costs nothing and closes that gap.
Does the objective audit mean this is poor work?
No, and the audit is not an assessment. This is an examined, passed thesis, and the register here is what the document does and what its own artefacts show. The audit records that three objectives and two hypotheses were stated, that one objective is fully delivered and two partly, and that the hypotheses were never tested because the variable they are about was never measured.
Why is a completion report from a different project included at all?
Because it is the only completed research-ethics closure form the library has, and its blank template is the only statement anywhere of what such a closure requires. It is used for that and labelled as another study's document. This project has no closure report, which matters because its own information sheet offers participants a summary of findings on request.
Can anything here be generalised to theses in general?
No. Every count, percentage and verdict on this page belongs to the study that produced it. The defects are visible only because this project published its whole apparatus, which is exactly why they cannot be treated as evidence about work that publishes less.
Where should I start if I want to run this on my own project?
Start with the two cheapest checks. List each variable in your hypotheses beside the question number that measures it, and re-derive every percentage in your draft from its count and base. Between them they would have caught the two things this project could not recover from.
References and source attribution
- A complete research dataset supplied as student work: one examined master's thesis (62 pages, 11,741 words) with its survey instrument as issued and as a working document, its participant information sheet, its raw response file, its ten-sheet analysis workbook and its project schedule. Researcher, supervisor, institution and protocol numbers scrubbed. Used as observed practice, not as a model answer.
- A completed research-ethics project completion report supplied with the same batch, belonging to a different project by a different researcher under a different protocol. Cited only for its template requirements.
- National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research 2007 (updated 2018), named by the project's own participant information sheet as the basis of its compliance and retention claims.
- The supplied teaching source: weekly study notes, slide decks and assessment activities for a master's-level research methods subject in project management. Author, institution and year not stated in the supplied files.
Suggested questions for Ask KEVOS
- What artefacts should I keep so my research project can be checked end to end?
- How do I audit whether my thesis delivered the objectives it set out?
- What does it mean for a dependent variable to be unmeasured, and how do I spot it early?
- How do I check that the percentages in my discussion chapter match my data?
- How should I organise an analysis workbook so the figures in my thesis can be traced back to it?