Basically I need to come up with a research project proposal using a certain template
Suggested Outline for Research Project Proposals
A&S 200
This course requires you to write a research project proposal draft for three of the four methods we are exploring. As a proposal preparation tool, the National Science Foundation recommends the following checklist for proposals:
1. What is the research question?
2. Have you entered into a dialogue with the literature?
3. What is the project’s theoretical contribution?
4. What do you expect to find?
5. How will you know if you are wrong? (falsifiablity).
6. What, where and when will you conduct your research?
7. What kinds of evidence (data) will you gather?
8. How will you analyze the data?
The following outline will help you to address each of these questions for your particular research question. The final product should be a polished, double-spaced, formally-written, spellchecked document of 2-3 pages (not including references or appendices) ready for submission to an institutional review board or funding organization such as the A&S Department’s Ethnographic Research Fund.
Title: Give an informative title that mimics the format of the titles of articles you have read in A&S courses.
I. Introduction (3 sentences)
Get readers interested in reading more.
State your research problem first! Then introduce the central research question. Set off this question from the rest of the text with a bullet point and the letters “RQ: ”. Tell the reader the basic outline of the research you are proposing in one sentence.
II. Significance (1 paragraph)
Very briefly introduce your research question in the context of other sociological and social science literature on the subject or related subjects.
Summarize what is already known about the field. What issue(s) do prior studies leave unresolved that you would like to study? Explain why these failings have led you to your specific research question. In this section make sure you have at least 2-3 scholarly sources that you can cite to set your own research into the context of other work. I expect you to frame it in terms of anthropological and sociological theory related to your topic.
III. Research Design (2-4 paragraphs plus 2 brief tables)
A Methods
Introduce the specific method you will use. Justify why this is a good method to use to answer your RQ. I expect you to use and cite our Dixon et al. textbook heavily in this portion of the proposal, and to propose a study that meets the criteria of high quality anthropological and sociological work. The aim here is to propose a study whose research standards would allow for publication in a mainstream sociology journal.
• Participants/population: Who will you study and why?
• Describe how you would sample the population and explain why you have chosen this sample. Include age, and any other demographic information relevant to the design.
• Are there any participants you would exclude? Why or why not?
• How would you enhance generalizability and reliability in your study?
• Explain the variables you will be testing, your procedures for testing them, and any instruments you have developed to test these variables. (This may be more important for some methods than others.) Explain how you will establish direction of influence empirically, if necessary.
• Controls: What kinds of factors will you control for in your study?
B Field Site
Introduce your site. Explain why it is a good place to answer the RQ you chose to investigate. Describe the site physically and/or socially. Give its history, if necessary. Describe the important social relations there.
C Access/Human Subjects
Discuss your access to the site and your role in it. Also discuss any particular personal relationship to the research question that may exist. Discuss how you will get human subjects or administrative approval, what
organization you will get this from, and how you will establish rapport with subjects, if relevant. Note any special risks, or potential harm to vulnerable populations, that might require a full (as opposed to expedited) review by an IRB.
D Analysis and Limitations
How will you analyze the results? Explain what kind of results you would
need to find to confirm or disconfirm any hypothesis(es). Discuss the
limitations of this larger proposed study and how you will address these in your analysis.
E Timeline
Different stages of proposed study: e.g. IRB approval, data collection,
testing, writing up, etc., must be indicated in a neat, brief table. In other words, you need to visualize the whole project from inception to completion.
F Budget
Be as specific as possible in identifying various costs of your study in a brief table.
IV. Conclusion (1 SHORT paragraph)
Discuss, in general, how your proposed research would lead to a significant improvement over the original studies, and how it would benefit the field. (In other words, why should someone care? If you were applying for money to do this, why would someone fund you? If you wanted to publish your results, why would they be interesting?) This is where you make a bid for both the “scientific merit” and “broader impacts” (real world relevance) of this particular research project.
References
A full list of all references cited in the proposal. Cite references using Chicago style in-text citations (Author year: p#) and Chicago style in the bibliography. Get help from a reference librarian or the Chicago style guides online if you don’t know how to cite properly.
Appendices
Attach printouts of the abstract and first page of any article you have used as a scholarly source, and the table of contents of any books you have used as scholarly sources.
