Assisting Postgraduate Students To Synthesise Qualitative Propositions To Develop A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

With the advent of the Fourth/Fifth Industrial Revolution (4/5IR), the interplay between using software for automated text analysis and the human researcher, for example, a postgraduate student, is becoming increasingly challenging. Having sourced the relevant publications to be used in the development of a literature review chapter, a student is faced with the task of analysing the said publications and extracting the sections relevant to their research. These analyses may arguably be automated through sophisticated software. Yet, to warrant a student's name on the title page of a dissertation or thesis, the student should do a substantial amount of the work manually in terms of surveying the scholarly literature as well as synthesising the collected content into a coherent piece of work. Depending on the subject area, it may be customary to develop a conceptual framework synthesised from the themes identified in the literature survey. As the body of knowledge in each subject increases, the development of a framework becomes hard. To this end, we present a methodology of proposition development that may guide a student to synthesise a framework from the important aspects in a literature review chapter. Our approach focuses on the development of four sets of propositions. We apply our approach to a small piece of text and formalise the approach in the form of a pseudo-code algorithm. Future work will involve the refinement of our technique.