Research Proposal

RESD 600

Dr. Ling Wang

Research Proposal (20 points)

Guidelines:

• Students will identify a topic of interest and develop a proposal for research to address an important question relevant to that topic.

• The proposal should contain

  • a statement of the problem (2 points)

  • a brief literature review (5 points)

  • a clear description of the purpose of the research and formulation of hypotheses/research questions (3 points)

  • a clear description of the methodology that WILL BE used (including research design, sampling, data collection, and data analysis, 2 points EACH and a total of 8 points)

  • some anticipated potential problems with the research design (1 point)

Note: One (1) point is assigned to the format of the proposal. The format should be consistent with APA (6th edition).

Instructions for How to Do a Good Literature Review:

From your readings you have probably come across the basic steps in a literature review, but let me refresh your memory with these guidelines:

• Select topic (ok to be broad)

• Write purpose statement (this should explain why you wish to explore the topic). Along with this, you should start to sketch out your problem statement. Together these are usually only a couple of sentences and will be completed after you have some research to back you up. So, to begin with, a broad statement/rationale for the study.

• Select key words from your problem statement, and do a search of those words/phrases using library and possibly Internet sources.

• After conducting an initial search, go through the abstracts to see which are the most noteworthy or helpful to you. For example, 12 articles that are opinions and none that are research won't usually do much for you in terms of credibility.

• After acquiring relevant literature, look for other resources mentioned in the literature that may be relevant to your study that you did not find initially.

• Organize articles, draft an outline of the literature review, and mark which articles fit where. If you have gaps then you may need to get more articles.

• Write the review, and this can be different depending on whether it's qualitative or quantitative.

  • Organize by sections: introduction, critical review of articles (this may have subtopics broken out into categories), and summary. Your introduction should revisit your problem statement and/or the purpose of the study. Also, it should give some insight into the field (e.g., there are two camps of reasoning in this field) as a transition into your critique of the literature. Your summary should conclude that, after looking at the literature, your research is necessary because (e.g., lack of knowledge, conflicting opinions, new variables, etc.).

  • Organize your critiques of the studies by topic/ideas/variables (hence the subtopic areas I mentioned above). Make sure your transitions between each are cohesive and tie together.

Additional Notes:

• A scoring rubric can be downloaded. Please pay attention to which rubric to use (There are two rubrics, one is for a quantitative study and the other is for a qualitative study).

• The research proposal should be 7-14 pages double spaced.

• Formatting requirements:

  • Title Page to include Class Name (e.g., RESD 600 xxx Term 201x), Student Name, and Assignment Name/Topic.

  • Reference List (complete citations in proper order and following APA (6th ed.) requirements).

  • Appendices, glossaries, etc., as appropriate.

  • Where appropriate, the assignments should be written in third person.

  • New Times Roman, 12 point, double space, and standard left and right margins - usually 1'' all margins.