A research proposal, sometimes called a prospectus, is the first three sections of a research report—the introduction, the literature review, and the methods sections. In an academic environment, a research prospectus would be presented to a thesis or dissertation committee. If the committee agrees with the researcher’s plan, then they may approve the student to complete the research project. The functional equivalent of this routinely occurs in criminal justice practice. Often practitioners are asked to offer proposals for conducting agency-sponsored research or to secure the necessary resources.
Merge and rewrite if necessary your introduction, literature review, and research plan into a single document in the form of a research proposal. Use the resource titled “Tips for Synthesizing the Introductory, Literature Review, and Methods Outline Sections” to help you with this process.
Exercise #5a—Tips for Synthesizing the Introductory, Literature Review, and Methods Outline Sections (Optional–but Useful)
Up to this point, the three major assignments in this project have been produced somewhat independently of each other. You wrote the introduction early in the term. This introduction included a research question. Then, by mid-term you completed a literature review. Near the end of the term, you produced a document that described how you intended to collect the data necessary to answer your research question—the same question that you developed at the beginning of the course.
Along the way, even though you may have adhered very closely to the procedures outlined in your Researcher’s Notebook, it is inevitable that the focus of your research project drifted a little. This is normal. After all, when you first wrote your research question you were relatively uninformed about your research topic. During the literature review process, you became informed of the controversies within your research topic. You might have even become more interested in a related topic. These happenstances may have caused you to rethink your research question. In a similar way, when you first indicated how you intended to conduct the research (in the introduction) you knew very little about research methods. After learning about the advantages and disadvantages of the various research methods you might have discovered a better method than the one you proposed in the introduction.
So, your task now is to merge the introduction, literature review, and methods sections into a single document, which we will call a research proposal. Here are a few tips for doing this.
1. Reread your introduction. Pay particular attention to the content requirements and how they might be changed in lieu of what you now know.
a. Given what you now know about the previous research (from the literature review):
i. Should you revise your research question?
ii. Are there additional problems or issues that you were not aware of that should be added to your introduction?
iii. Do you still think that your intended audience would be interested in this research?
iv. What sources did you actually use and where did they come from?
v. Should you rethink the intended outcome of your research?
b. Given that you now know the actual method that you intend to use, should you revise the methods part of the introduction?
2. Next, focus on the literature review. Pay particular attention to the relevance of your literature review to:
a. Your research purpose
b. Your proposed method
3. Finally, write the methods section from your outline.
a. Be sure to explain how your method will respond to your research question.
b. Consider adding a section to the methods section that discusses how this research will add to the previous research. For example, you may be proposing to conduct an experiment when all of the previous researchers on this topic used a survey.
4. As you write the methods section, ‘tell the story’ of how you intend to conduct the research. Describe the steps the same way you might describe how you are planning to take a trip or vacation—progressing from one place to another. Try to avoid technical jargon to the extent possible.
Now you have three compatible documents. The content in the introduction, most notably the research question, is relevant to the information in the literature review. The proposed method will produce data relevant to the research question.
The rest of the process is stylistic. Begin by adding the literature review to the end of the introduction and adding the rewritten methods section to the end of the literature review. Go back through the entire document to be sure margins, headings, indentations, and other stylistic issues are consistent.
These are the document that have to be use only but you can change this to
