Research Proposal Assignment
Introduction
The research proposal will begin with an introductory section that describes the research problem and establishes its significance. This section answers the following kinds of questions: What exactly do you want to study? Why is it worth studying? Does the proposed study have theoretical and/or practical significance? Does it contribute to a new understanding?
Literature Review
The research problem or objective needs to be informed by published, empirical literature. The literature review presents a discussion of the most important research and theoretical work relating to the research problem/question. The literature review should address the following kinds of questions: What have others said about this topic? What theories address it and what do these say? What research has been done (or not done) previously? Are there consistent findings or do past studies disagree? Are there flaws or gaps in the previous research?
Research Question. Your specific research question(s) or hypotheses should be stated clearly either at the end of the description of the research problem/question or at the end of the review of the literature.
Methods
Describe how you plan to conduct your study. Regardless of the type of research you plan to do, you need to indicate how you will carry out your study, you will need to justify the value and potential contributions of your study. For example, for empirical research, this section includes a description of the participants, the measurements, the data-collection methods, and analysis/analyses. You will need to describe who, how, and why you have selected these participants and how you specifically you will collect and analyses the data. Further, you need to make a case for how these methodologies will answer your research question(s).
Participants. Describe the participants for your study. Explain your method of selecting your participants, how you will access them, and how these participants relate to your research question. This section typically answers the following questions: Who or what will you study? How do these participants relate to your research question(s)? How large of a sample is needed?
Measurement. Describe the kinds of measures you intend to use and explain why you have selected these. A discussion of measurements generally considers the following questions: What are the key variables in your study? How will you define and measure them? Do your definitions and measurements draw on or differ from those of previous research in this area? Your measurement selection will be guided by your research question.
Data-Collection Methods. Describe what you plan to do and the kind of research you will conduct. This section typically considers the following questions: How will you collect the data for your study? And what kind of study will you conduct (e.g., ethnographic, case study, experiment, survey, historical, textual analysis, etc.)?
Analysis. Describe the kind of analysis you plan to conduct and explain the logic and purpose of your analysis. This section typically answers the following kinds of questions: Do you intend to describe what and how of a given phenomenon? Do you intend to examine relationships among variables? or do you intend to explain why things are the way they are? What possible explanatory variables will your analysis consider and how will you know if you’ve explained the variables adequately? If you plan to use specific statistical procedures, state these.
References
Include a reference of all sources cited in the research proposal. Double-check your reference list against the proposal to make sure that all sources appear in both places. This should be formatted using the most current APA manual.
Page Length: Your proposal should run between at least 8-10 pages.
