For your final assignment, you will be synthesizing elements from each week of reading, thinking, and writing you have done all semester into a Research Project Proposal. This is the basis of many grad school and grant applications.
Imagine you are requesting money from me, a granting agency, to support you in conducting six months of research.
You need to justify what you need the money for, exactly, and how you are going to spend it, and what the social scientific community is going to get out of having spent this money on you and your research.
Each granting agency has different requirements for formatting and style so don’t worry about that kind of thing in this assignment. That means there is no word limit, and you can format it however you like. I also do not want you to write in a fancy, formal academic style.
Write plainly and clearly about what you want to do, how you want to do it, and why you want to do it, for each of the items listed below, with as much detailed explanation as you can.
When you use a key concept like “nomothetic” or “dependent variable” make sure you define it and then use it correctly so I know you know what it means!
You are encouraged to develop, adapt, or revise elements of your previous community forum discussions for any or all of the questions below
(the literature review will be a narrative discussion of the sources you gathered in your annotated bibliography, so that will need to be more developed).
You may decide you want to start a section fresh with new ideas. It’s your project so you have freedom to define it how you want, as long as you make reference to the ideas and methods we have discussed throughout the semester to explain your choices.
This is like your final exam, so revisit and reread whatever you need to, and then show me you understand what your options are as a social researcher, and that you can make intelligent, thoughtful, well-justified choices in designing a research project. I’d like to see you take the tools I have offered you this semester and make them your own. That’s it!
Elements to include in your Research Project Proposal:
Research question
Literature review
Research strategy (idiographic or nomothetic, inductive or deductive)
Research goals (basic or applied)
Units of analysis and units of observation
Key concepts (conceptualization and operationalization)
Method of data collection
Research participants (sample and population)
Ethical concerns
There is no word limit on this assignment. Please be as detailed and thoughtful as you can in writing, and please proofread for clarity and correctness so I can read it without difficulty.
