1. Knowledgeable: is thoroughly familiar with the focus of the interview; pilot interview of the kind used in survey interviewing can be useful here.
2. Structuring: gives purpose of interview; rounds it off; asks whether interviewee has questions.
3. Clear: asks simple, easy, short questions; no jargon.
4. Gentle: lets people finish; gives them time to think; tolerates pauses.
5. Sensitive: listens attentively to what is said and how it is said; is empathetic in dealing with the interviewee.
6. Open: responds to what is important to interviewee and is flexible.
7. Steering: knows what he/she wants to find out.
8. Critical: is prepared to challenge what is said, for example, dealing with inconsistencies in interviewees’ replies.
9. Remembering: relates what is said to what has previously been said.
10. Interpreting: clarifies and extends meanings of interviewees’ statements, but without imposing meaning on them.
11. Balanced: does not talk too much, which may make the interviewee passive, and does not talk too little, which may result in the interviewee feeling he or she is not taking along the right lines.
12. Ethically sensitive: is sensitive to the ethical dimension of interviewing, ensuring the interviewee appreciates what the research is about, its purposes, and that his or her answer will be treated confidentially.

Closed Questions:

Closed questions structure the answer by only allowing responses which fit into pre-decided categories. Data that can be placed into a category is called nominal data. Closed questions can also provide ordinal data (which can be ranked).

They can be economical. The respondent provides information which can be easily converted into quantitative data. The questions are standardized.

They lack detail. Because the responses are fixed, there is less scope for respondents to supply answers which reflect their true feelings on a topic.

Open Questions:

Open questions allow people to express what they think in their own words. Open-ended questions enabled the respondents to answer in as much details as they like in their own words. Often used for complex questions that cannot be answered in a few simple categories but require more detail and discussion.

Rich qualitative data is obtained as open questions allow the respondent to elaborate their answer. This means the research can find out why a person holds a certain attitude.

Time-consuming to collect the data. Time-consuming to analyze the data. Not suitable for less-educated respondents as open questions require superior writing skills and a better ability to express one’s feelings verbally.

1. Aims -Make sure that all questions asked address the aims of the research. However, use only one feature of the construct you are investigating in per item.
2. Length -The longer the questionnaire, the less likely people will complete it. Questionnaire should be short, clear, and be to the point; any unnecessary questions/items should be omitted.
3. Pilot Study -Run a small scale practice study to ensure people understand the questions. People will also be able to give detailed honest feedback on the questionnaire design.
4. Questionnaire order -Questionnaire progress logically from the least sensitive to the most sensitive, from the factual and behavioral to the cognitive, and from the more general to the more specific.
5. Terminology -There should be a minimum of the technical jargon. Questionnaire should be simple, to the point and easy to understand. The language of a questionnaire should be appropriate to the vocabulary of the group of people being studied.

1. Understand the purpose – The basic purpose of your PhD proposal is to assist you in completing your research and deliver your PhD Thesis easily.
2. Establish an engaging title – Your title is the first thing that is going to get most of the job done. It is quite obvious. Your PhD Proposal must have engaging title.
3. Follow the format precisely – Abstract>Introduction>Literature Review>Thesis statement>Methodology>Outcomes>Limitations>Contribution>References
4. A perfect plan – Before writing the proposal, draft plan. Create an outline and follow the flow.
5. Begin writing – start writing after talking to your mentor regarding the tone of the proposal.
6. Proofread – A proofread is a must from the start to the end.

1. An abstract generally is few hundred words long while extended abstract normally is 1 to 4 pages with 1 or 2 pages explaining data collected in figures or/and tables.
2. An abstract is a preliminary submission that summarizes the contribution of a paper. The length of an abstract is strictly limits within few hundreds of words and rarely exceeds 1000 words. While for extended abstract, it is longer than an abstract but shorter than a full paper, normally around 2 to 6 pages.
3. An extended abstract usually contains references, comparisons to related works and other detailed expected results. It is wrote to be understood within 1 hour of reading. Compared with a full paper, an extended abstract can omits some contents such as future work, very specific details of tests that not relevant to the key ideas of the abstract.

research design can be categorized into qualitative or quantitative. Qualitative research design determines relationships between collected data and observation based on mathematical calculations. Quantitative research design on the other hand, basing on statistical conclusions to collect actionable insights. Numbers provide a better perspective to make critical business decisions.

In general, research design can be categorized into five categories:

1. Descriptive research design: In a descriptive design, a researcher is solely interested in describing the situation or case under their research study. It is a theory-based design method which is created by gathering, analyzing and presenting collected data.
2. Experimental research design: Experimental design establishes a relationship between the cause and effect of a situation. It is a causal design where one observes the impact caused by the independent variable on the dependent variable.
3. Correlational research design: Correlational research design is a non-experimental research technique that helps researchers establish a relationship between two closely connected variables.
4. Diagnostic research design: In diagnostic design, the researcher is looking to evaluate the underlying cause of a specific topic or phenomenon. This method helps one learn more about the factors that create troublesome situations.
5. Explanatory research design: Explanatory design uses a researcher’s ideas and thoughts on a subject to further explore their theories. The research explains unexplored aspects of a subject and details about what, how, and why of research questions.

Choosing the right journal for publication may be a painful process. How to choose a correct journal? Here some tips:

1. Understand the strength of your paper. Determine the list of papers that you cited in your paper. Consider to publish your paper in journal that published the most influential paper referred in your text. If you feel your paper is weaker, then go for lower tier or try to improve the content. For example, if the paper that you referred the most was published in journal with IF 1 and you feel that your paper is weaker than that paper then you should try Scopus indexed journal.
2. You can using the keywords of your paper to search for the suitable journals through the journal finder under Elsevier, Taylor WoS and so on.
3. Another way is find the journals through your reference list. Search the journal and analyze it. Check either the journal is calling for a special issue or the scope is suitable or been changed.
4. Before submitting to a particular journal, you can also email the journal editors to ask for details such as providing the title of your paper and ask either your paper is suitable for submission.
5. Do the proofreading before submission.

1. Introduction is at the beginning of a text while Literature Review (LR) is located after the introduction or problem background.
2. Introduction introduces the main text to the readers while LR critically evaluates the existing research on the selected research area and identifies the research gap.
3. Introduction consists of elements such as background, outline of key issues, research aim and objectives and definition of terms and concepts while LR consists of summaries, reviews, critical evaluations and comparison of selected research studies.
4. Introduction usually short while LR usually lengthy.

There are 5 important variables to be exploited to identify research gap:

1. Citation Analysis – Scan highly cited papers that probably lead to prominent gaps in your research area. Also, spend time to go through the other papers that cite the particular highly cited paper to analyze the ongoing related research. If the particular highly cited paper have too many citations, narrowing down by analyzing the latest papers.
2. Content analysis – Crunching down a particular content of a paper to extract the necessary gap.
3. Meta analysis – please refer the previous post for details. Usually this method is used to collect a list of related literature/papers, organize the papers into several important constructs to identify the research gap.
4. Systematic review – Usually using literature matrix and synthesize until find the research gap.
5. Future research/limitation – Usually a academic paper will state the future works at the end of the paper or within the conclusion. When you synthesize papers in a particular topic, extract all the limitations and future works and compile. Afterwards analyze the trend and do the prediction of the upcoming related research.

1. Formation of research question or problems
2. Preliminary search to validate the idea to assure none had done it before
3. Set the inclusion and exclusion criteria based on RQ and preliminary search
4. Search strategy: Keywords used, boolean operators and filters
5. Move to full text screening, apply inclusion/exclusion again. Report the new total.
6. Start screening title and abstract based on inclusion/exclusion. Report the total selection.
7. Write the protocol/ methodology, and seek for ethical clearance if required.
8. Databases explored: WoS, Scopus and etc. Use Mendeley/Endnote to remove duplicates.
9. Manual search by forward/backward snowballing
10. Quality assessment based on specific criteria decided by authors
11. Start reviewing all the selected papers and extract similar and differential information
12. Produce literature matrix, and based on the outcome of matrix, start writing paper