This assignment is intended to enable you prepare for your research paper this term. Your goal in this assignment is to develop a plan showing the feasibility of your proposed research. You will identify a research question relating to our class theme of Digital Technologies & Political Participation and propose ways to find answers to that question.
While the proposal is not the research itself, you will need to have read around your topic to articulate a meaningful draft. You can expect that the direction of your research may change as you make progress beyond the proposal. This is not atypical. Excluding the annotated bibliography, the rest of your proposal will be between 400-500 words. Please note that without completing the research proposal assignment, you may not proceed to conduct the research itself.
Specific Guidelines:
To obtain a “passing/complete” grade for this assignment, your proposal must include the following components, which would be organized as subheadings:
A working, informative title.
A summary of your research topic orchestrating a conversation among at least threeof the sources you have assembled in your annotated bibliography.
An explanation of the research gap you hope to fill and its significance.
A clearly stated and answerable research question.
Hypothesis/assumption(s) based on which you are asking your research question. Your hypothesis/assumption(s) will typically be guided by your preliminary readings on the topic and inform the reader what you hope to find in your research.
Data and Methods: what data/primary materials and method you plan to use in answering your research question and the rationale for your choice.
A brief description of your purpose for working on this project. Why did you choose this project, and what do you hope to learn from the research?
A brief discussion of the key challenges you imagine facing. What concerns do you have regarding the research/project?
An annotated bibliography of between 4 and 6 sources. At least three of these should be peer-reviewed journal articles, with the rest being books, book chapters, reports, etc. Not more than one of your sources can be from our class reading list.
Each annotation, written in our paragraph and preceded by bibliographic citation for the source, should be approximately 75-100 words. Annotations should
summarize the source even-handedly and inform us of the main findings or arguments in the source.
evaluate the source’s usefulness, strategies, or accuracy.
indicate the source’s relationship to other sources in the bibliography, or its place in your overall research.
