======= Date Modified 10 Jul 2011 23:25:20 =======
Hi

Many thanks for your response and your wise counsel. Its good to know that what I am proposing is acceptable as it gives me a lot more confidence to proceed with my work. As advised, I have already reached out to one of my lecturers for assistance. I am also looking at narrowing down my secondary data sources to government publications/reports, reports from International agencies and articles from reliable local newspapers. Admittedly it may still be a bit much but I think things are beginning to take shape in my head such that there is consistency throughout the research . Thanks once more for your help.

======= Date Modified 09 Jul 2011 10:13:10 =======
I am a distance learning student and have been juggling full time work with my program. Its been tough at times but I am now at the dissertation stage and have only 7 -8 weeks to complete my work due to no real fault of my own (only got the go ahead mid June to submit first week September). I have done a decent amount of reading in the build up to that but supervision is a bit thin at the moment, only worsened by my distance from the institution.

Basically, I need to know if it is acceptable to tackle my research questions by accessing/referring to secondary data from a variety of sources (as my research topic spans issues in 2 very different countries). I need some guidance with fashioning my research methodology as I feel the only option I have now is to refer to data from existing reports and other publications in providing answers to my research questions. I had initially planned to do some structured interviews in both countries but that seems to have gone out of the window now given my serious time constraints.

Any guidance/direction will be highly appreciated.