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:
What is your proposed dissertation topic?
Imagine that you are reading the first section of your Introduction chapter out loud (i.e., where you start to build the case for your dissertation). When introducing your proposed dissertation topic, it helps if you are telling a story of sorts. Start with your dissertation title and go from there:
For this example, let's imagine that you are interested in a population and context/setting-based generalisation under Route B. You might say something like:
I'm interested in exploring the relationship between ethical sales behaviour, relationship quality, and customer loyalty (i.e., the title of your dissertation, which may also be similar or the same as the title of the main journal article). A number of studies have been conducted recently and within the last 10 years that have looked at this impact of ethical sales behaviour. These studies have been conducted in a variety of countries, including Jordan (Alrubaiee, 2012), Spain (Román & Munuera, 2005), Iran (Hazrati et al., 2012), and Taiwan (Ou et al., 2012), with a focus on the financial services and insurance industries (Román & Munuera, 2005; Chen & Mau, 2009; Alrubaiee, 2012; Ou et al., 2012). I'm interested in understanding whether the same relationship between ethical sales behaviour, relationship quality, and customer loyalty exists in the United Kingdom (i.e., you could choose any country not covered) and amongst a different population of salespeople, namely mobile phone retailers and their customers.Why is it worth carrying out this research?
The reasons why your dissertation is worth carrying out will varying considerably, but you should have a good sense of these reasons at this stage since they will have influenced your choice of route (i.e., Route A: Duplication, Route B: Generalisation or Route C: Extension). Since our example was of a population and context/setting-based generalisation under Route B: Generalisation, we use the goal of checking the external validity (i.e., generalizability) of a previous study as our main justification for taking on the dissertation:
Example continued...
To date, only one study has examined ethical sales behaviour in a retail context (see Hazrati et al., 2012), but this was carried out in Iran, focusing on electronic consumer goods, and only examined some of the constructs that influence relationship quality and customer loyalty (i.e., trust, customer satisfaction, and commitment). In addition, there has been an overemphasis of the financial services industry in studies, despite the fact that the salesperson-customer relationship is conceivably important to customer loyalty in a much wider range of populations and contexts/settings. In my dissertation, I want to build on the recent study of Alrubaiee (2012) who looked at the relationship between ethical sales behaviour, relationship quality, and customer loyalty, albeit in the financial services industry in Jordan. My dissertation will help to find out whether Alrubaiee's (2012) findings are externally valid (i.e., generalizable) when applied to a new context/setting (i.e., the United Kingdom) and population (i.e., mobile phone retailers and their customers).What research questions/hypotheses do you plan to address?
When it comes to letting your supervisor know what research questions/hypotheses you are going to address, you can simply list these. Remember that for population and context/setting-based generalisation under Route B: Generalisation, we often only have to modify the research questions/hypotheses from the main journal article. We can do the same for our proposed dissertation in which there were 7 research hypotheses in the main journal article, but we have just modified 3 for our example:
Example continued...
H1: Ethical sales behaviour has a positive effect on customer trust in the mobile phone retailer.
H2: Customer trust in the mobile phone retailer has a positive effect on customer loyalty to the mobile phone retailer.
H3: Relationship quality (i.e., customer trust and customer commitment) mediates the effect of ethical sales behaviour on customer loyalty to the mobile phone retailer.
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.