Construction of research in a master’s program

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a research on the construction of a thesis project in a Master’s Program. This research was carried out as a proposal of a discipline called Qualitative Analysis of Discursive Information in the Master’s Program in Environmental Education at Fundação Universidade Federal do Rio Grande – FURG, Rio Grande, RS, Brazil. This collective research was carried out as an educational principle, so that the students in the Master’s Program could experiment several steps of the qualitative research process: the interview, the transcription, the unitarization, the categorization, and the production of meta-texts. Results show the following phases in the process of constructing the object of research: the first idea of the object of research; the change of the object of research; the construction of the object of research during the discipline; and the object of research defined in the defense of the project.