Research Proposal Guidelines

A good strategy is to break the literature into "conceptual categories" [themes] rather than systematically describing groups of materials one at a time.Note that conceptual categories generally reveal themselves after you have read most of the pertinent literature on your topic so adding new categories is an on-going process of discovery as you read more studies.Thus, the objective here is to convince the reader that your overall research design and methods of analysis will correctly address the problem and that the methods will provide the means to effectively interpret the potential results.

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Research proposals contain extensive literature reviews. They must provide persuasive evidence that a need exists for the proposed study. Information for Students: Writing a Research Proposal. Even if this is just a course assignment, treat your introduction as the initial pitch of an idea or a thorough examination of the significance of a research problem.

In addition to providing a rationale, a proposal describes detailed methodology for conducting the research consistent with requirements of the professional or academic field and a statement on anticipated outcomes and/or benefits derived from the study's completion. After reading the introduction, your readers should not only have an understanding of what you want to do, but they should also be able to gain a sense of your passion for the topic and be excited about the study's possible outcomes.

Note that such discussions may have either substantive [a potential new policy], theoretical [a potential new understanding], or methodological [a potential new way of analyzing] significance.

When thinking about the potential implications of your study, ask the following questions:.

The purpose is to reflect upon gaps or understudied areas of the current literature and describe how your proposed research contributes to a new understanding of the research problem should the study be implemented as designed.

The conclusion reiterates the importance or significance of your proposal and provides a brief summary of the entire study.

Be specific about the methodological approaches you plan to undertake to obtain information, the techniques you would use to analyze the data, and the tests of external validity to which you commit yourself [i.e., the trustworthiness by which you can generalize from your study to other people, places, events, and/or periods of time].

Just because you don't have to actually conduct the study and analyze the results, doesn't mean you can skip talking about the analytical process and potential implications.

How do you know you've covered the key be well-written and logically organized because you are not actually doing the research, yet, your reader must have confidence that it is worth pursuing.

The reader will never have a study outcome from which to evaluate whether your methodological choices were the correct ones.