please use the feedback and the reading list to write the research proposal. feel free to your own research
The purpose of this assessment is to help you develop your skills in research design and to have a trial run of how to formulate a dissertation proposal. This includes the ability to choose an appropriate topic, formulate relevant research aim(s) and question(s) and to select an appropriate method, all of which you will need in preparation for your dissertation next year. You are expected to engage with academic literature on your chosen topic to help you develop ideas for your proposal and you must read about methodology and your chosen method. You will be required to justify your choice of methodological approach and reflect on the ethical and practical dimensions of your proposed research. The proposal should also demonstrate understanding of the kind of knowledge that your research would generate and who it might be relevant for. Remember this is a proposal and you are not doing the actual research.
Stage 1: Identify a suitable research topic related to the broad theme of ‘power and inequality’.
It can be difficult to come up with a suitable topic. Think about what you have learnt about in a module or something that relates to your own interests and experience. Whatever topic you choose, it needs to relate in a broad way to power and inequality. If you are struggling to come up with an idea, talk to your seminar tutor.
Your topic must be ethically viable.
Although you are not actually doing the research, you still need to make sure your proposal is ethically viable. You should avoid research that:
• Is likely to cause distress or harm to participants.
• Includes people under 18.
• Involves vulnerable participants, such as prisoners, hospital patients, pregnant people.
• Involves use of sensitive personal data.
For example, you will not be able to access prisoners or prison records, so there is no point in proposing to interview them about their experience or analyse their records as it would not meet ethical criteria. You might instead be able to find secondary sources of data online, such as websites or news reports with testimonies that you could analyse but you would need to find out if that was possible.
You need to make sure your research meets professional ethical standards. You will be expected to read the British Sociological Association and/or the British Society of Criminology’s statement of ethical principles and reference it in the proposal.
Your topic must be manageable as an undergraduate project.
Although you have a whole year for your dissertation, realistically, you will have only a few months to do the research so think about what is manageable within that timeframe.
Here are some ideas to make the research more manageable:
• Do not be over-ambitious. Narrow down your focus to a particular aspect of your topic that you can explore within the timeframe.
• Use one main method rather than try to adopt a multi-method approach. Only use a second method if it helps to improve the main method.
o For example, you could conduct an exploratory focus group to help you clarify what issues to cover in a survey, but the survey would be the main method.
• As a rough guideline to help you understand the scope of the proposal, dissertation students are expected to do a minimum of:
o 60 self-completion questionnaires (online or paper) if doing a survey; or
o 8 semi-structured interviews of at least 40 minutes’ duration each if doing qualitative interviews.
o For textual/discourse analysis, the number of sources would depend on your project.
• You cannot design research that requires any expenses as there is no money available.
Here are a few examples of topics chosen by previous students:
• Representations of immigrants in Swiss newspapers
• Women leaders’ perspectives on sexism in the workplace
• University students’ experiences of studying online during Covid-19
It is a good idea to discuss your proposal idea with your seminar leader or one of the sociology or criminology team if it relates to their research interests. You can speak to any member of the teaching team in their office hours.
Stage 2: Conduct a literature review.
When you have an idea for a topic, you need to find out what other people have written about it and how they approached their research. You should use Library Search or relevant social science databases – don’t rely on Google! When you are reading someone else’s research, identify the key theoretical perspectives and concepts they are using to inform their research and what method(s) they used to collect data. Suggestions by other researchers about what issues need further research might give you a focus for your own research proposal.
By reading other’s people’s research, you can narrow down your focus to something manageable, clarify the aims of your research, generate research questions, and select an appropriate perspective, concepts, and method(s). Your reading should also inform the themes you focus on in your research (e.g. the questions you ask in an interview or survey).
Stage 3: Identify realistic, achievable research aims and research questions.
In order to decide what is realistic and achievable, you need to think about the scope and scale of your research. See the points above about what an undergraduate student can realistically be expected to achieve and read about research design. The more focused the research is the more realistic it is.
For example, rather than aiming to overcome racism in the workplace in a single research project, think about an aspect of it. You are not in a position to conduct a race audit of the university or an analysis of the Black-White gap in achievement. More realistically, as a student, you can focus on, for example, students’ awareness of racism, their experience in the classroom, or the content of their curriculum. In this case your aim might be to explore students’ awareness or experience of racism.
Stage 4: Research Design.
You need to provide a detailed description and justification of your research design. This section depends on you reading about the method you have chosen in some detail to understand how to apply it to your research question as well as understanding of the topic. You must use academic sources on research methodology from the module reading list – don’t just google the method!
Identify an appropriate methodological approach. Methodology involves three elements: the theory informing the research, the choice of research methods and the epistemological framework. Epistemology relates to how we understand the knowledge produced through research, e.g. whether we see it as based on objective facts (a positivist epistemological position, which is rare these days) or subjective interpretation (an interpretivist epistemological position). Research is likely to start from your own politics and values in terms of what you care about and may be informed by a particular perspective such as an anti-racist, feminist, or queer approach. This will influence what you read and the aims, methods, and concepts you use in your research.
Select a method. Aim to select one main method of data collection for the proposal as you will be able to be more focused in your application of it and it is more achievable than adopting a multi-methods approach. Choosing the method relates to what you are trying to find out and is influenced by what methods other researchers on your topic have chosen. You are aiming to get the best fit between your aims, research question and method. If you want to find out about the extent of a problem, you are more likely to use quantitative methods. If you are more interested in understanding what it is like to experience sexism in the classroom or stop and search on the streets, you would select a more qualitative method such as semi-structured interviews or focus groups. If you are interested in how a particular group of people, such as young Black men, are represented in the media, you might conduct discourse analysis of news articles. Explain your choice of method and state the advantages of using that method to address your research question.
Some important distinctions:
• Primary research is research that involves collecting and analysing your own data. Primary methods of data collection include questionnaires, qualitative interviews, and focus groups.
• Secondary research involves analysing data that other researchers have collected.
• Secondary quantitative data analysis involves further analysis of original, ‘raw’ data collected by someone else, such as SPSS datasets from national surveys, available through the UK Data Archive. It is not enough to simply report other people’s analysis of the data (e.g. in the form of tables published online) – this would be part of your literature review.
• Discourse analysis and other forms of textual/documentary analysis involves gathering and analysing data that already exist ‘out there’ such as policy documents, newspaper articles, TV programmes or social media posts.
Select an appropriate sampling strategy and explain how you would go about identifying and recruiting participants for your study. You need to read about sampling in a research methods textbook to identify the different types of sampling strategy. If you are doing discourse analysis, you still need to provide sampling details to justify the selection of sources, the time period covered etc. For example, what will you be looking at if you are analysing media representations of police brutality? Will it be newspaper articles, for example? From which newspapers? What timeframe will you cover? How many articles? If you are proposing to analyse secondary quantitative data, you need to identify the dataset(s) you intend to use and the particular variables you want to include in your analysis.
Identify a provisional list of questions or themes you will explore in your research to address the research question. These are not the same as your main research question which informs the overall design. This is a key element of the research which requires careful planning. What are you going to ask your participants when you do interview them or ask them to complete a survey? How will you know what to look for in a discourse analysis of hate crime on social media? The ideas should be based on your reading about the topic and include references to the literature. The list will depend on the method but think about the following:
o How will you operationalise concepts (i.e., turn them into something measurable) for a survey on fear of crime – what specific questions would you ask?
o What themes would you focus on in a semi-structured interview or focus group?
o What variables and relationships would you be examining in a secondary data analysis of Islamophobia (e.g. ethnicity and fear of walking alone after dark in the Crime Survey for England and Wales)?
Explain how you intend to analyse the data. What will you do with the findings once you collect the data? For quantitative research such as a survey, this might involve comparing how different ethnic groups view the police treatment of Black people or differences in fear of crime by gender. This would involve collecting data using a questionnaire and entering the data into SPSS to conduct a statistical analysis of the differences between participants. Alternatively, with secondary quantitative data analysis, it might involve using the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) data sets to analyse differences in how participants responded by gender for example. If you have collected qualitative interview data, you might be analysing it thematically, linking to the original questions or themes identified in the literature review. Discourse analysis, meanwhile, might involve identifying and analysing particular words, phrases, or images to show how a particular issue is constructed or how a group of people is represented.
Explain how you will address the ethical issues raised by the research. What steps will you take to comply with the ethical principles of social research? Think about issues like informed consent, confidentiality, anonymity, participants’ right to decide not to answer a question or to withdraw from the research, how you might support a participant who becomes upset during the research, keeping data safe etc. Make sure you use the British Sociological Association’s or British Criminology Society’s ethical guidelines and read research methods textbooks so that you understand the ethical issues and how to address them.
Explain how you will manage the practical aspects of the research. How will you access your sample of participants or secondary data sources? Do you need to negotiate access with a gatekeeper? What is the timescale for the research? What platform will you use to conduct an online survey? Where will you conduct interviews? How do you ensure yours and your participants’ safety? How will you record and store data? These are some practical issues which might apply to your research, and you need to show that you have covered them. You might use the literature on the topic here to reference how previous researchers have managed this and other aspects of the research process.
Stage 5. Evaluation of the research.
Reflect on the benefits and limitations of your research design. What kind of knowledge would be produced by your research – e.g. ‘objective’ knowledge about the prevalence of a problem, or more ‘subjective’ knowledge about people’s experiences? If your proposal involves quantitative methods, reflect on the validity, reliability, and generalisability of your expected findings. If you are conducting qualitative research, these criteria might not apply in the same way, but you should still think reflect on the quality, integrity and broader relevance of your findings.
Reflect on the impact your research might have. Who would benefit from the knowledge generated by your project? How might your research help us understand and challenge power and inequality?
Write your proposal using the following headings:
Title.
Choose a title relevant to your chosen topic. It should not be a question.
Introduction.
Provide a brief description of your research topic and why you chose it. State how it relates to power and/or inequality and your aims and research question. This should be a short paragraph.
Literature review.
This literature review should be based on reading at least three academic sources (journal articles or book chapters) about the topic, provide a brief overview of how it has been covered by other researchers and focus in to discuss the more specific angle you have chosen. Don’t forget to identify what methods have been used by existing researchers on your topic as you might want to choose the same method and adjust it to your research question. This section should be no more than a couple of paragraphs (200 words) as it is setting the background for your research. Avoid quotes other than to define key concepts you intend to use in your proposal.
Methodology
This section needs to include a description of and justification for your choice of methodological approach and method(s) of data collection. You will need to draw on your reading about research methods (from academic sources only!) to explain your choice of method(s) and why it is the most appropriate for your research aims and research questions. You should identify the specific questions or themes you plan to ask/focus on and explain how you intend to analyse your data.
Research plan
This should include a detailed, concrete description of how you would conduct your research. You should explain your sampling strategy, how you would identify and recruit participants, and how you would collect your data. For example, if you are doing a survey, explain how you would administer your questionnaires – e.g. via an online platform, self-completion questionnaires on paper, or a structured interview? If you are doing qualitative interviews, would you conduct them in person or online? Where would you conduct them? How would you record them? If you are doing a discourse analysis, how would you go about searching for sources?
You also need to identify ethical and practical challenges and explain how you would address these. For example, do you anticipate any difficulties in accessing data or recruiting participants? Is there a chance that participants might be upset by taking part? What might you do to mitigate against this?
In reading this section, we should be given enough information about how you intend to conduct the research that we could follow the steps ourselves.
Evaluation of the research design
This section involves your reflections on the research proposal, its strengths and weakness etc. Include reference to epistemological issues such as the type of knowledge produced and its validity, reliability and generalisability (or alternative evaluation criteria for qualitative research). Make sure the evaluation criteria fit the method. What is the broader relevance of the research and how might it be used to challenge power relations or inequalities?
General guidelines
• You are designing a research proposal not doing the actual research.
• Leave yourself plenty of time to complete the research proposal and start working on it sooner rather than later.
• Use office hours and the seminars to discuss your ideas with your tutor.
• You are required to draw on academic literature on research methodology as well as on your specific topic.
• As a minimum, your proposal needs to include at least three sources on research methodology from the module reading list, and at least three academic sources relating to your research topic.
• You are only allowed to use sources from the module reading list or sources that can be accessed through Library Search or academic databases.
• You are strongly urged to attend the tutorial in week 12 to discuss your ideas for the proposal.
• Use the ‘red book’ to ensure correct referencing and bibliography style.
• Don’t forget to include a word count and a bibliography!
In marking this assignment, tutors will consider:
• The ability to identify a relevant and appropriate research topic.
• Evidence of relevant background reading on the topic, and the ability to situate the proposed research within existing theory and research.
• Formulation of a relevant research question and realistic aims.
• Selection and justification of an appropriate methodological approach and research method(s) that will allow students to address their research question.
• A clear and realistic plan for the research.
• Quality and extent of reflection on the validity, reliability and generalisability of the proposed research findings.
• Quality and extent of reflection on the ethical and political dimensions of the research.
• Professional presentation with clear headings and structure, accurate referencing and bibliography, attention to grammar, spelling and academic English.
