Proposal Stage Guidelines
In conversation, I realized that re-emphasizing your task for the proposal might be useful. The following is drawn directly from the course syllabus.
Your proposal should have the following elements (the parts about executing the research design are left out):
III. Elements of the Project
A. Introduction to the topic – explain why the topic is interesting and important to you and to others. This section will present your research question(s) – a narrowed, answerable question related to the topic and the topic’s background. The research question can only be asked after you have examined what others have done and found.
B. Literature review – an introduction to what others have said about the larger and related questions. This includes highlighting disagreements by those authors. You should seek to justify your choice of research question after reviewing what others have asked. This will be based on what others have written, yet left unexplored or unsatisfying. The literature review leads to the research question.
C. Research design – the crafting of procedures to collect and evaluate evidence that will help answer the question. This section should culminate with your Hypothesis – what is it you expect to find once you have gathered data and information?
The following elaborates on these:
A. Introduction
The introduction introduces the project to your reader. The introduction is typically the last part that you will actually write, since it provides an overview of the paper and its results. At first, you should instead concentrate on selecting your topic.
The part that does happen at the outset, “behind the scenes” is topic selection. The key is to select a topic that is interesting to you. It should probably concern an area that you have learned something about, have had some related experience, and would like to know more. If your department track is American politics, it could be on American politics; if your track is in Law and Politics, it should probably be there; and if it is World Politics, the topic should concern some topic you have encountered from those classes and related learning experience and activities.
A topic is an area of interest; it is not a research question. Your initial task is to familiarize yourself with the major debates in your topical area and to understand how your own experience/activities relate to the topic. The knowledge you gain from reading the topical works, and summarizing them, is crucial in crafting a good research question.
Creating an extended annotated bibliography (EAB) is a useful step in preparing to ask a good research question, and eventually to designing a good research project. It involves reading what has been written in the topic area you have selected. Your goal is to systematically review what has been written, with an eye towards finding a research question that “emerges” out of the literature.
B. Literature Review
The next component of a research paper is a review of the literature on the subject, i.e., a comparison of the alternative explanations or answers to the question one has posed (or at least similar questions within the same topic range). Invariably in the social sciences, you will find that alternative explanations or solutions to your question have been proposed. Hence, a clear and concise statement of these competing explanations is necessary.
The literature review really is a justification of your research question. It takes your research question and places it within the context of the literature. You will use the articles in your EAB to explain what has been done so far. This means that, in your own words, you must summarize what has been done by other researchers. This is precisely what your EAB does. But in the literature review you will want to connect them in a logical manner that:
1. identifies the larger topic.
2. explains how others have sought to address this topic.
3. identify where they agree and where they disagree.
4. identify what has not been answered definitively.
5. formulate a research question, and explain how this will help provide some evidence that will shed further light on the question.
Special note: Keep in mind the distinction between “primary research” and “secondary research.” Ordinarily, reading what others have written on your topic is considered secondary research. Secondary research is important to your project; it constitutes your literature review. Primary research involves your own particular examination of the research question, either by using data/evidence you generate on you own, or by re-examining the research of others, but interpreting it in light of your own research question.
Research Question. The literature review might lead to any number of questions. A research question is a narrow application of larger topical questions. An example of a broader topic of interest might be: “who are likely voters in presidential primaries?” By contrast, a research question might ask something more specific, such as “why are younger Americans less likely to vote than are older Americans in presidential primaries?” You will find that nearly all articles you read have research questions. As you create the EAB, identify both the larger question asked, but also the much more narrow research questions. It will be crafted in context with what you have been learning in creating a bibliography.
C. Research Methodology or Design
The third section introduces your research design. A well-designed test of the different predictions can lead us to accept some theories, and discard others. For example, your analysis might be a case study, a pair of case studies, a quantitative analysis, or a theory paper. After presenting how you intend to do your research, you must explain the advantages and disadvantages of your research design. For example, if you are doing a case study, you should explain why a case study is appropriate for your research, and why you selected your particular cases. In addition, you must specify the limitations of a case study approach.
Your research question will help to determine your methodology. For example, suppose your hypothesis is that countries with higher military expenditures are more likely to go to war. You may have a strong inclination to believe that because countries with higher military expenditures are more warlike by nature and that their militaries are likely to be larger and more “powerful” they will resort to war more easily. In effect, you are arguing that larger military expenditures lead to more frequent global turmoil. Having a strong inclination to believe this is not enough. You need to gather data on military expenditures and interstate wars over time. You will also need to consider and investigate other factors that may account for heightened rates of war. The seminar will explore different methods of gathering information to test hypotheses.