ROUTE #1: Getting Started
ROUTE #1: Chapter-by-Chapter

CONSIDERATION ONE

The way you talk about your proposed dissertation topic

From your supervisor's point of view, this will be the first time you have discussed your topic, and if your supervisor is not your tutor, the first time you may have even met. Your supervisor will not be thinking in terms of a main journal article or specific routes. Whilst these are the building blocks of many a dissertation, you're unlikely to have a conversion about taking on a population-based generalisation under Route B: Generalisation for the journal article, Exploring the relationship between ethical sales behaviour, relationship quality, and customer loyalty, published in the International Journal of Marketing Studies, and so forth. Instead, you're more likely to talk about (a) what your topic idea is, (b) why it's worth carrying out, and (c) what research questions/hypotheses you plan to address:

You'll notice that we have put 3-4 additional references into the introduction of our proposed dissertation topic. We are not suggesting that you perform a detailed critical literature review at this stage, but you should have some idea, at least from the main journal article, of other studies in the field that may help you to justify why it's worth carrying out your dissertation. Since we were trying to put forward a justification for a population and context/setting-based generalisation under Route B: Generalisation, we wanted to find a least 2-3 additional journal articles that looked into ethical sales behaviour and either relationship quality or customer loyalty. When we did this, it strengthened our desire to check the external validity (i.e., generalizability) of Alrubaiee's (2002) study because there had been so few populations and contexts/settings that had been examined when it came to the relationship between ethical sales behaviour, relationship quality, and customer loyalty.

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