Guidelines on Writing a Research Proposal

Guidelines on writing a research device excogitation This is a guide to writing M. A. research ends. The same principles apply to oratory aims and to proposals to most championship agencies. It includes a model outline, merely advisor, committee and funding agency prognosticateations vary and your proposal bequeath be a form on this basic theme. map these guidelines as a point of deviation for discussions with your advisor. They may serve as a straw-man against which to skeleton your under take overing of some(prenominal) your project and of proposal writing.For USM students, the same rules apply as for proposals e very(prenominal)where in the world. end Writing Proposal writing is important to your pursuit of a graduate degree. The proposal specifies what you leave behind do, how you clear do it, and how you go away fork over the results. In specifying what depart be d wizard it besides gives criteria for determining whether it is done. In approving the propos al, your committee gives their best judgment that the attack to the research is sane and likely to yield the required results. Both parties benefit from an agreed upon plan.The physical object in writing a proposal is to describe what you will do, wherefore it should be done, how you will do it and what you stick out will result. Being put one across about these things from the beginning will avail you comp allowe your dissertation in a timely fashion. A good thesis proposal hinges on a good idea. Once you have a good idea, you plenty draft the proposal in an evening. Getting a good idea hinges on familiarity with the topic. This assumes a longer preparatory period of reading, observation, discussion, and incubation. order everything that you sight in your argona of interest.Figure out what are the important and inadequacying part of our understanding. Figure out how to build/discover those pieces. Live and fleet the topic. Talk about it with anyone who is interested . Then just publish the important parts as the proposal. Filling in the things that we do not know and that will help us know much that is what research is completely about. Proposals help you estimate the size of a project. Dont make the project too big. Your proposal will be possibly five pages and certainly no more than fifteen pages long. For perspective, the American topic Science Foundation limits the length of proposal narratives to 15 pages, even when the request might be for multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is the be of the proposal which counts, not the weight. ) Shoot for five pithy pages that orient to a relatively well- inform audience that you know the topic and how its logic hangs together, kinda than fifteen or twenty pages that indicate that you have read a lot of things entirely not stock-still boiled it down to a set of prioritized linked questions.Different Theses, Similar Proposals In the abstract all proposals are very similar. They pic k out to yield a reasonably informed contributor why a particular topic is important to overcompensate and how you will do it. To that end, a proposal postulate to show how your take fits into what is already cognise about the topic and what new contribution your civilize will make. Specify the question that your research will fare, establish why it is a hearty question, show how you are going to function the question, and indicate what you expect we will strike.The proposal should situate the playact in the belles-lettres, it should show why this is an (if not the most) important question to answer in the dramaturgy, and allure your committee that your approach will in fact result in an answer to the question. Theses which channelize research questions that can be answered by make plan- adequate observations (and hypothesis testing) are preferred and perhaps the easiest to write. Beca hire they channelress well-bounded topics, they can be very tight, but they do r equire more planning on the front end. Theses which re largely based on synthesis of observations, rumination, speculation, and assurance formation are harder to write, and usually not as convincing, often because they address questions which are not well-bounded and essentially unanswerable. Literature review-based theses involve collection of information from the literary works, distillation of it, and coming up with new insight on an issue. matchless problem with this type of research is that you might find the perfect pithy answer to your question on the night before (or after) you turn in the final draft in someone elses work.This certainly can bam the wind out of your sails. (But note that even a straight-ahead science thesis can have the problem of late in the game discovering that the work you have done or are doing has already been done, this is where familiarity with the pertinent literature by both yourself and your committee members is important. ) A Couple of Mod els for Proposals A twain Page (Preliminary Proposal) Model Here is a model for a very brief (maybe five paragraph) proposal that you might use to interest energy in sitting on your committee. People who are not yet ensnareed may especially appreciate its brevity.In the startle paragraph, the first sentence identifies the general topic area. The second sentence gives the research question, and the 3rd sentence establishes its significance. The abutting couple of paragraphs gives the larger historical perspective on the topic. Essentially list the major schools of thought on the topic and very briefly review the literature in the area with its major findings. Who has compose on the topic and what have they found? Allocate about a sentence per important person or finding. Include any explorative findings you have, and indicate what open questions are left.Restate your question in this context, viewing how it fits into this larger picture. The next paragraph describes your me thodology. It tells how will you approach the question, what you will conduct to do it. The final paragraph outlines your expected results, how you will interpret them, and how they will fit into the our larger understanding i. e. , the literature. The (Longer) Standard Model The Basic thesis Outline Introduction Topic area Research question (finding? ) import to familiarity Literature review Previous research others & yours Interlocking findings and nonreciprocal questionsYour preliminary work on the topic The remaining questions and inter-locking logic reiterate of your research question(s) in this context modeology Approach entropy require Analytic techniques Plan for interpreting results Results Discussion and Conclusions Bibliography You get the idea of what the proposal does for you and organizing your thoughts and approach. The section below goes into slightly more (boring) detail on what each(prenominal) of the points in the outline is and does. The Sections of the Proposal The Introduction Topic Area A good title will clue the reader into the topic but it cannot tell the whole story.Follow the title with a strong submission. The introduction provides a brief overview that tells a fairly well informed (but perhaps non-specialist) reader what the proposal is about. It might be as short as a single page, but it should be very clearly written, and it should let one assess whether the research is relevant to their own. With luck it will hook the readers interest. What is your proposal about? Setting the topical area is a start but you need more, and quickly. Get limited about what your research will address. Question Once the topic is established, come right to the point.What are you doing? What specific issue or question will your work address? real briefly (this is still the introduction) say how you will approach the work. What will we learn from your work? Significance Why is this work important? Show why this is it important to answer thi s question. What are the implications of doing it? How does it link to other knowledge? How does it stand to inform policy making? This should show how this project is significant to our dead body of knowledge. Why is it important to our understanding of the world? It should establish why I would want to read on.It should also tell me why I would want to support, or fund, the project. Literature Review State of our knowledge The persona of the literature review is to situate your research in the context of what is already known about a topic. It need not be exhaustive it necessitate to show how your work will benefit the whole. It should provide the theoretical foundation garment for your work, show what has been done in the area by others, and set the defend for your work. In a literature review you should give the reader fair to middling ties to the literature that they feel confident that you have found, read, and assimilated the literature in the theme.It should likely mo ve from the more general to the more focused studies, but need not be exhaustive, only relevant. Outstanding questions This is where you present the holes in the knowledge that need to be plugged and by so doing, situate your work. It is the shoot for where you establish that your work will fit in and be significant to the discipline. This can be made easier if there is literature that comes out and says Hey, this is a topic that needs to be treated What is the answer to this question? and you will sometimes see this type of piece in the literature. Research Questions in DetailYour work to date Tell what you have done so far. It might report preliminary studies that you have conducted to establish the feasibility of your research. It should give a sense that you are in a position to add to the body of knowledge. Methodology Overview of approach This section should make clear to the reader the way that you intend to approach the research question and the techniques and logic that y ou will use to address it. Data Collection This might include the field site description, a description of the instruments you will use, and particularly the data that you anticipate collecting.You may need to comment on site and resource accessibility in the time frame and budget that you have available, to demonstrate feasibility, but the emphasis in this section should be to fully describe specifically what data you will be using in your study. Part of the purpose of doing this is to detect flaws in the plan before they become problems in the research. Data Analysis This should explain in some detail how you will prepare the data that you assembled to get at the information that you will use to answer your question.It will include the tools that you will use in processing the data, such as the type of interviews you will undertake, statistical software and techniques (if youre doing a quantitative study), survey instruments, or any innovative approach youre developing. It prob ably should also include an indication of the arrange of outcomes that you could reasonably expect from your observations. Interpretation In this section you should indicate how the anticipated outcomes will be interpreted to answer the research question.It is extremely beneficial to anticipate the range of outcomes from your analysis, and for each know what it will mean in terms of the answer to your question. Expected Results This section should give a good indication of what you expect to get out of the research. It should join the data analysis and possible outcomes to the possibility and questions that you have raised. It will be a good place to summate the significance of the work. It is often useful from the very beginning of formulating your work to write one page for this section to focus your reasoning as you build the rest of the proposal.Bibliography This is the list of the relevant works. There is no reason to offer irrelevant literature but it may be useful to prog ress track of it even if only to say that it was examined and found to be irrelevant. Use a standard format. Order the references alphabetically. Tips and Tricks Read. Read everything you can find in your area of interest. Read. Read. Read. Take notes, and blab to your advisor about the topic. If your advisor wont talk to you, find another one or rely on the net for expert interaction.Email has the advantage of forcing you to get your thoughts into written words that can be refined, blue-penciled and improved. It also gets time stamped records of when you submitted what to your advisor and how long it took to get a response. Write about the topic a lot, and dont be afraid to land up (delete) passages that just dont work. Often you can re-think and re-type faster than than you can edit your way out of a hopeless mess. The advantage is in the re-thinking. very(prenominal) early on, generate the research question, critical observation, interpretations of the possible outcomes, and the expected results.These are the core of the project and will help focus your reading and thinking. stipulate them as needed as your understanding increases. Use some dogmatic way of recording notes and bibliographic information from the very beginning. The classic approach is a deck of indication cards. You can sort, regroup, layout spatial arrangements and work on the beach. Possibly a slight improvement is to use a word-processor charge that contains bibliographic reference information and notes, quotes etc. that you take from the source. This can be sorted, searched, diced and sliced in your familiar word-processor.You may even print the index cards from the word-processor if you like the ability to physically re-arrange things. Even better for some, is to use specialized bibliographic database software. Papyrus, Journler, EndNote, and other packages are available for PCs and MacIntoshs. Another cursor is to keep in mind from the outset that this project is neither the l ive nor the greatest thing you will do in your life. It is just one step along the way. Get it done and get on with the next one. Cover your topic, but dont confuse it with too many loosely relevant side lines.The balance between Introduction and Literature Review needs to be thought out. The reader will want to be able to figure out whether to read the proposal. The literature review should be sufficiently inclusive that the reader can tell where the bounds of knowledge lie. It should also show what has been done and what seem to be accepted approaches in the field and the kinds of results that are being gotten. Useful References Krathwohl, David R. 1988. How to Prepare a Research Proposal Guidelines for Funding and Dissertations in the Social and Behavioral Sciences . Syracuse University Press.Recent National Science Foundations Guidelines for Research Proposals can be found on the NSF website, www. nsf. gov. Chamberlain, T. C. The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses, reprinted in Science, Vol 148, pp754-759. 7 May 1965. Platt, J. Strong deduction in Science, Number 3642, pp. 347-353, 16 October 1964. Strunk and White The Elements of Style Turabian, Kate. 1955 (or a more recent edition) A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses and Dissertations, University of Chicago Press. Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. 1940 (67, 72 etc). How to Read a Book. Simon and Schuster Publishers. New York City, NY.