Goal and audience
• The goal of the paper should be to inform your fellow-students regarding an important current issue (problem or misunderstanding) in the Asian country of your choice.
• With this paper, you will demonstrate your ability to 1) develop a sound research question and subquestions, 2) to find reliable and scientific / peer-reviewed sources, 3) select appropriate information to use from the sources you found, 4) quote, paraphrase and summarize information from your sources;
You will choose a topic that you find interesting and that is Asian related. The topic should:
• Be related to the cultural, political or sociological context that is the focus of the Trade Management for Asia program.
• Be current, i.e. you must be able to demonstrate that the choice of topic is relevant to the current (social, political, economic or cultural) situation in the region
Research question and subquestions
Within your topic, you will choose a subtopic and develop a research question. Your research question should:
• Be specific, i.e. for examples research questions such as ‘The effects of Abenomics’, ‘The effects of abolition one child policy’ in China, ‘What to do about pollution in Beijing’ or ‘Effects of the ageing society in Japan’ will NOT be approved, because they are not specific enough. You should investigate into the subtopics of your subject, and your paper should focus on one of those subtopics, for instance: ‘The effects of the one child policy on 2nd children in poor families that are born in China’, or ‘the effects of particular measure X of Shinzo Abe’s economic policy’.
• Be based in an exploratory research into your subject of choice. You cannot establish the subtopics and focus on a subtopic without doing research. You should do desk research before you hand in your research question, and you should indicate the sources you used to develop your research question (in APA-style).
• Your paper should focus on a hot topic, problem or misunderstanding regarding current developments in Asia.
• Your research question should be specified in four subquestions.
Sources
• It is crucial that you select respectable, trustworthy and authoritative sources for your report. No Wikipedia, no tabloid newspapers, and no sources directed at children.
• You are required to use scientific or peer-reviewed articles as your main source of information.
• For each subquestion, a minimum of three unique text sources is required. This means that each person must have six unique text sources, and your team must have at least twelve different sources in the bibliography of the report. Image sources do not count towards this total.
• In your interim assignments, in which you discuss your progress and the sources you found, you should indicate the relevance of every source. Each source requires a brief summary of three-five sentences with reasoning why you would or would not use this source.