A brainstorming exercise to produce a proposal prototype and a derived synopsis form: on a hobby and interest short-course centre
I am a part-time MBA student, currently learning do my dissertation project. My job involves managing a community centre in Hong Kong, organizing and offering hobby and interest short-course classes to the local residents in a few local districts in Hong Kong. I am aware of quite a number of managing challenges, involving recruiting capable tutors to these these short courses as well as attracting local residents to attend these courses. There is also an issue that some of my colleagues in the community centre do not have a dedicated attitude to manage these courses. Could you suggest, based on my work concerns, what management or management sub-topics are related to my work concerns, so that I can come up with a crude research theme for my dissertation project. Try to suggest 4 to 5 management topics/ subject topics for me to consider.
Good context to work from — you've already got three distinct pain points: tutor recruitment, resident attendance/enrollment, and staff attitude/motivation. Each maps fairly cleanly onto an established management sub-field, which is exactly what you want for a dissertation, since you need a theme with real academic literature behind it. Here are five candidate topics to consider:
Human resource management: recruitment and retention
Your difficulty finding "capable tutors" is fundamentally a talent acquisition and retention problem, often intensified in part-time, freelance, or gig-style staffing arrangements common at community centres. Literature on recruitment channels, job design for part-time instructors, and psychological contracts with non-permanent staff would apply directly here.
Employee motivation and organizational commitment
The colleagues who "do not have a dedicated attitude" points toward motivation theory (e.g., Herzberg's two-factor theory, Vroom's expectancy theory) or organizational commitment research. A dissertation could investigate what drives (or fails to drive) engagement among community centre staff, and whether this links to job design, leadership style, or reward structures.
Marketing communication and customer/consumer behavior
Attracting local residents to enroll in short courses is a demand-generation and marketing communication problem. This could explore promotional channels, word-of-mouth, service marketing (given courses are intangible experiences), or consumer decision-making models applied to leisure/hobby learning.
Service quality and non-profit/public service management
Community centres often sit in a quasi-public, non-profit-like context, and there's a well-developed literature on service quality (e.g., SERVQUAL) and public/non-profit service delivery challenges, which could tie your tutor-quality, attendance, and staff-attitude issues together under one umbrella theme.
Leadership and change management in community/non-profit settings
If the staff attitude issue is more about how the centre is led than about individual motivation per se, leadership style (transformational vs. transactional) and change management in non-profit or public-service contexts could be a unifying angle, especially if you're trying to shift a culture, not just fix individual behaviors.
A practical next step Joseph often recommends to his own students: pick two of these that feel most "yours," then do a quick scan of 10 to 20 recent journal articles on each before committing, since feasibility of data access (can you interview your own colleagues and residents?) matters as much as theoretical interest.
I am interested in the 3rd topic, i.e. "Service quality and non-profit/public service management". Thus my crude research theme is "evaluating and improving the service quality of the short-hobby and interest short course training unit of the local community centre in Sham Shui Po in Hong Kong. Also I am interested to considering the following key words to refine my research theme: pragmatism, exploratory research, non-profit service management, service improvements. Please suggest a few research issues, public media-reported issues and 3 academic theories (with Harvard references) to me as well as 3 concrete refined research themes to me.
Research issues to explore
Your proposed topic is viable because it connects a practical service problem with a manageable organizational setting: course users, tutors, frontline colleagues, and centre management. In Sham Shui Po, affordability and accessible participation channels have been identified as important to residents’ participation in activities, so “service quality” should include more than teaching quality alone.jcafc
Possible research issues include:
· Service-user expectations versus perceptions: Which aspects of course service matter most to residents—course fees, timetable, location, tutor capability, enrollment process, staff responsiveness, course variety, or learning outcomes?
· Tutor recruitment and service consistency: How do recruitment methods, selection criteria, training, and communication with part-time tutors affect perceived course quality?
· Frontline staff engagement: How do staff motivation, role clarity, workload, supervisory support, and accountability affect enrollment administration and learner experience?
· Accessibility and inclusion: Do residents face barriers related to price, digital registration, timing, language, disability access, or lack of course information?
· Improvement prioritization under constraints: Given limited funding and staff capacity, which changes would generate the largest improvement in participation and user satisfaction? Hong Kong welfare organizations have publicly raised concerns that funding reductions may harm staffing retention and service quality.scmp
Publicly reported context
You can frame the study as locally relevant without claiming that every reported issue occurs in your own centre:
· Local consultation findings in Sham Shui Po highlight affordable programme costs and sufficient participation channels as valued by residents.jcafc
· Hong Kong social-welfare operators have warned that budget pressure can affect both manpower retention and service quality.scmp
· Hong Kong policy material on adult education emphasizes operator quality assurance, inspections, evaluation reporting, and the importance of qualified and committed teaching staff.legco.gov
· A broader public-service issue is the tension between increasing expectations for better services and limited resources; user feedback is presented as central to NGO service improvement.lwb.gov
Three useful theories
1. SERVQUAL / Gap Model of Service Quality
Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry distinguish service-quality dimensions such as reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and tangibles. You could adapt these dimensions to measure gaps between what residents expect and what they experience in short courses.
Reference: Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A. and Berry, L.L. (1988) ‘SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality’, Journal of Retailing, 64(1), pp. 12–40.
2. Expectancy-Disconfirmation Theory
This explains satisfaction as a comparison between prior expectations and actual performance. It fits course participants: satisfaction may increase when the tutor, class content, service process, and facilities meet or exceed expectations.
Reference: Oliver, R.L. (1980) ‘A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions’, Journal of Marketing Research, 17(4), pp. 460–469.
3. Public Service Motivation
This theory examines why people are motivated by serving the public and contributing to society, rather than only by pay or personal gain. It offers a strong lens for studying why some colleagues are highly committed while others may show weaker engagement with course management.
Reference: Perry, J.L. and Wise, L.R. (1990) ‘The motivational bases of public service’, Public Administration Review, 50(3), pp. 367–373.
Refined dissertation themes
1. A pragmatic exploratory study of service-quality gaps in hobby and interest short courses at a community centre in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong.
Focus: residents’ expectations and experiences, using a short survey plus interviews with learners, tutors, and staff.
2. Improving non-profit short-course services: an exploratory mixed-method study of participant satisfaction, tutor capability, and frontline staff engagement in a Sham Shui Po community centre.
Focus: how the three stakeholder groups jointly influence service quality and practical improvement actions.
3. Service improvement priorities for community-based hobby and interest courses in Sham Shui Po: a pragmatic study using SERVQUAL and stakeholder perspectives.
Focus: identify and rank the most important service gaps, then develop feasible recommendations within resource constraints.
Your proposed keywords fit particularly well with Themes 1 and 3: pragmatism supports using whatever methods best answer the practical problem, while exploratory research suits a setting where you first need to discover which quality problems stakeholders consider most important.
Please suggest a dissertation proposal to me with the following information elements: dissertation title, an overall research theme, 4 research objectives, 3 research questions, the researcher positionality an overall research methodology, 3 primary research methods (i.e. semi-structured interview with 2 training unit staffs and 5 short course customers and opinion questionnaire survey with my friends, 1 secondary data analysis, a brief project timeline (for this four-month part-time dissertation project). Also suggest 3 academic theories to use (with references in Harvard reference format).
Dissertation proposal
Dissertation title
Evaluating and Improving Service Quality in Hobby and Interest Short Courses: A Pragmatic Exploratory Study of a Community Centre Training Unit in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong
Overall research theme
This project examines how a non-profit community centre can improve the quality, accessibility, and attractiveness of its hobby and interest short courses. It focuses on the perspectives of training-unit staff, current or past course customers, and informed external respondents, with attention to tutor capability, staff service attitudes, course administration, and customer satisfaction.
Research objectives
1. To explore how training-unit staff and course customers perceive the current quality of short-course services.
2. To identify key service-quality gaps in areas such as tutor quality, staff responsiveness, course information, enrollment procedures, course scheduling, and value for money.
3. To examine how staff engagement and operational practices may influence customers’ short-course experiences.
4. To propose practical, resource-sensitive service improvements for the training unit.
Research questions
1. How do training-unit staff and short-course customers evaluate the current service quality of hobby and interest courses?
2. What service-quality problems and improvement priorities are identified by staff, customers, and external survey respondents?
3. How can the training unit improve its service delivery, tutor management, and customer experience within a non-profit community-centre context?
Researcher positionality
The researcher is a manager or practitioner connected to the community-centre setting and therefore has insider knowledge of its daily operations, including tutor recruitment, customer enrollment, and staff coordination. This position provides practical access to relevant issues and helps the researcher interpret operational realities.
However, insider status also creates possible bias: colleagues may hesitate to criticize management, and the researcher may interpret responses through existing assumptions. To reduce this risk, participation should be voluntary and confidential; interviews should use neutral questions; survey responses should be anonymous; and the researcher should keep a reflexive journal recording assumptions, decisions, and changes in interpretation.
Overall methodology
Use a pragmatist, exploratory, mixed-method case-study approach.
Pragmatism is suitable because the purpose is not only to describe a problem but also to identify workable service improvements. An exploratory design is appropriate because the specific service gaps and stakeholder priorities within this particular training unit are not yet fully understood. The study is a single-case study focused on one community centre training unit in Sham Shui Po.
Qualitative evidence can explain why problems occur, while quantitative survey evidence can indicate whether particular service issues are viewed as important by a broader group of respondents. Findings should be integrated through triangulation: compare areas of agreement and disagreement across interviews, survey results, and organizational records.
Primary research methods
1. Staff semi-structured interviews
Interview two training-unit staff members for approximately 30 to 45 minutes each.
Topics may include:
- Operational workflow and course administration
- Tutor recruitment, selection, communication, and monitoring
- Perceived causes of low enrollment or customer complaints
- Staff workload, role clarity, motivation, and coordination
- Existing service-improvement practices and constraints
Analyse the interviews using thematic analysis: transcribe or summarize responses, assign initial codes, group codes into themes, and link themes to the selected theories.
2. Customer semi-structured interviews
Interview five current or former short-course customers for approximately 20 to 30 minutes each.
Topics may include:
- Reasons for choosing or not choosing courses
- Expectations before enrollment
- Experience of staff service, tutors, facilities, class content, and booking procedures
- Satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and likelihood of returning or recommending the course
- Specific improvement suggestions
Recruit participants in a way that includes different courses where possible, such as arts, languages, exercise, technology, or lifestyle classes. This improves the range of perspectives, although the small sample should be treated as exploratory rather than statistically representative.
3. Opinion questionnaire survey
Distribute an anonymous online questionnaire to friends or acquaintances who are potential users of community-centre short courses. Aim for around 30 to 60 usable responses, depending on practical access.
The questionnaire can ask respondents to rate the importance of:
- Affordable course fees
- Convenient location and class times
- Tutor qualifications and teaching ability
- Clear course information
- Easy enrollment and payment
- Helpful staff
- Clean, safe, and suitable facilities
- Course variety
- Feedback and complaint-handling mechanisms
Use a five-point rating scale, ranging from “not important at all” to “extremely important,” and add one open-ended question: “What would make you more willing to enroll in a community-centre hobby or interest course?”
Analyse using descriptive statistics, such as frequencies, percentages, means, and ranked service priorities. Clearly state that this is a convenience sample and cannot represent all Sham Shui Po residents.
Secondary data analysis
Conduct document analysis of relevant internal and publicly available materials, subject to permission and confidentiality requirements. Possible sources include:
- Course brochures, social-media posts, website information, and promotional materials
- Enrollment, cancellation, waiting-list, and attendance records
- Customer feedback forms, complaints, compliments, and informal enquiries
- Tutor recruitment advertisements, selection criteria, agreements, and orientation materials
- Relevant Hong Kong government and NGO reports on community services, lifelong learning, service quality, and public/non-profit management
Create a simple document-analysis matrix with columns for: source, period, key evidence, identified service issue, and possible improvement implication. Avoid including personally identifiable information in the dissertation.
Project timeline
Period | Key activities |
Month 1 | Finalize title, research questions, literature review, theoretical framework, ethics materials, interview guides, and survey questionnaire. Seek organizational permission. |
Month 2 | Conduct the two staff interviews and five customer interviews. Launch the online questionnaire. Collect relevant documents and anonymized operational records. |
Month 3 | Complete survey collection. Transcribe or write detailed interview notes. Code interviews, analyse questionnaire results, and conduct document analysis. Compare findings across methods. |
Month 4 | Develop recommendations, write findings and discussion chapters, revise methodology and literature review, complete conclusion, proofread, format references, and submit. |
Academic theories
1. SERVQUAL / Service Quality Gap Model
SERVQUAL proposes that customers evaluate service quality through dimensions including reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and tangibles. In this project, it can structure questions about the dependability of class arrangements, staff helpfulness, tutor credibility, personal attention, and physical facilities.
Harvard reference:
Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A. and Berry, L.L. (1988) ‘SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality’, Journal of Retailing, 64(1), pp. 12–40.
2. Expectancy-Disconfirmation Theory
This theory argues that satisfaction depends on the comparison between customers’ prior expectations and their actual experience. It is useful for exploring whether customers feel that tutor quality, course value, administration, and facilities meet, exceed, or fall below their expectations.
Harvard reference:
Oliver, R.L. (1980) ‘A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions’, Journal of Marketing Research, 17(4), pp. 460–469.
3. Public Service Motivation
Public Service Motivation explains why employees may be motivated by contributing to the public interest, helping others, and creating social value. It can help analyse differences in staff commitment and explore ways that leadership, role design, recognition, and organizational culture might encourage more dedicated course management.
Harvard reference:
Perry, J.L. and Wise, L.R. (1990) ‘The motivational bases of public service’, Public Administration Review, 50(3), pp. 367–373.
Please highlight the following information elements from the dissertation proposal and related information to produce a proposal application form (a synopsis form) in less than 400 words (the dissertation title [item 1] and reference list [item 6] are not included in the word count): 1. Project title; 2. Project background: 2.1. A research theme statement, 2.2. Academic context: 2 main research issues, 2.3. Public and business context: 2 public media-related issues 2.4 The researcher's positionality; 3. Research objectives and questions; 4. The research methodology: 4.1 Research philosophy and research approach to use, 4.2 2 primary research methods to use; 4.3. 1 secondary research method to use; 5. Literature review: 2 academic theories to use; 6. A reference list.
1. Project title
Evaluating and Improving Service Quality in Hobby and Interest Short Courses: A Pragmatic Exploratory Case Study of a Community Centre Training Unit in Sham Shui Po, Hong Kong
2. Project background
2.1 Research theme statement
This study investigates how a non-profit community-centre training unit can evaluate and improve the service quality of hobby and interest short courses. It focuses on course customers’ experiences, tutor capability, frontline service, course administration, and feasible service improvements.
2.2 Academic context
Two main research issues are:
1. The gap between customers’ expectations and their perceptions of short-course service quality.
2. The influence of staff engagement and operational practices on customer experience and service consistency.
2.3 Public and business context
First, Hong Kong social-welfare organizations face resource pressure: small and medium NGOs are expected to experience a cumulative 3 percent funding reduction by 2027–28, while larger NGOs face 7 percent, creating risks for staffing and service delivery. Second, public reporting has noted sector concerns that funding cuts and rising staffing costs may lead to frozen posts, reduced staffing, or weaker service quality.info+2
2.4 Researcher positionality
The researcher is an insider-practitioner who manages community-centre activities and has direct knowledge of tutor recruitment, enrollment, and staff coordination. This access supports context-sensitive interpretation, but it may create bias and affect colleagues’ willingness to comment. Voluntary participation, anonymity, neutral interview questions, and reflexive notes will be used to reduce these risks.
3. Objectives and questions
Objectives:
1. Explore staff and customers’ perceptions of current service quality.
2. Identify service-quality gaps and improvement priorities.
3. Develop practical recommendations for service improvement.
4. Examine how tutor management and staff engagement affect customer experience.
Questions:
1. How do staff and customers assess present short-course service quality?
2. What are the most important service-quality gaps?
3. What feasible improvements can the training unit implement?
4. Research methodology
4.1 Philosophy and approach
A pragmatist, exploratory mixed-method case-study approach will be used. Pragmatism supports combining methods to address a practical management problem.
4.2 Primary methods
1. Semi-structured interviews with two training-unit staff and five current or former course customers; data will undergo thematic analysis.
2. An anonymous online opinion questionnaire for the researcher’s friends as potential course users; responses will be analysed with descriptive statistics and priority rankings.
4.3 Secondary method
Document analysis will examine anonymized enrollment/attendance data, customer feedback, course publicity, tutor-recruitment materials, and relevant public reports.
5. Literature review
SERVQUAL will assess reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and tangibles in course services. Expectancy-Disconfirmation Theory will explain satisfaction as the comparison between customer expectations and actual service experiences.
6. Reference list
Oliver, R.L. (1980) ‘A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions’, Journal of Marketing Research, 17(4), pp. 460–469.
Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A. and Berry, L.L. (1988) ‘SERVQUAL: A multiple-item scale for measuring consumer perceptions of service quality’, Journal of Retailing, 64(1), pp. 12–40.
Perry, J.L. and Wise, L.R. (1990) ‘The motivational bases of public service’, Public Administration Review, 50(3), pp. 367–373.
Estimated word count for Items 2–5: approximately 315 words (excluding title, reference list, headings, and citations).
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