Sustainability Accounting or Environmental Accounting

Your final research thesis paper should be a minimum of 50 pages long excluding cover page, abstract, table of contents, and reference pages and include between 25 and 30 references that were cited in the body of the thesis paper. Develop and complete your research paper using the following format:
1. Title/cover page
2. Abstract: An abstract is a brief, comprehensive summary of the contents of the article; it helps readers quickly review the contents of an article. A good abstract correctly reflects the purpose and content of the paper, reports rather than evaluates, requires the author to write in clear and concise language, and uses the present tense to describe results or conclusions. The abstract should be brief and each sentence should be maximally informative.
3. Table of Contents: Your Table of Contents should list key sections, headings, and sub-headings.
4. Introduction: Your introduction takes the following steps (Roberts, 2004, p. 119-120) (5-7 pages)
a. Describing the general area to be studied.
b. Identifying a more specific problem within the general area. Think about why this problem is important to study and specify what is already known about the problem.
c. Specifying what is not known about the problem that is important to study. Creswell (2014, p.115) states that the researcher asks, “What is the need for this study?” or “What problem influenced the need to undertake this study?”.
d. Clearly stating a specific purpose statement in one or two sentences followed by research questions that guide the study.
5. Literature Review: Conducting a literature review involves four steps (Roberts, 2004, p. 76-82):
a. Identifying key words or descriptors related to your topic.
b. Reviewing secondary sources (abstracts, indexes, encyclopedias, reviews, etc.).
c. Collecting primary source documents most relevant to your study.
d. Critically reading and abstracting the literature. Think about the questions such as what original insights can you gather about your topic not stated in any of the references? What important facts and opinions relate to your study? Are there important issues not well addressed?
6. Data Analysis:This section describes how you analyzed the data as well as your rationale for using a particular analysis method (Roberts, 2004, p. 142). State the findings of your research from the literature review and analyze the findings to your research question(s).
7. Results/Conclusion (5-8 pages)
a. Results: Summarize the data and report the data in sufficient detail to justify your conclusions.
b. Conclusions: Evaluate and interpret the implications of your results.
 Emphasize any theoretical or practical consequences of the results.
 Discuss if your research questions were supported or not supported. Compare similarities and differences between your results and the work of others.
 State the limitations of your research, and address alternative explanations of the results.
 End the discussion with the contribution of your study and justify why readers should attend to the findings.
 References: This section records all the resources you have cited in your research paper.