Overview
Research Proposal (Due 11/11)
After spending a semester reading and learning both about your topic and more details about methodologies, you will submit a research proposal. Proposals outline your knowledge and plans for future work and are important to make sure that a project is very much doable. The proposals will have two parts to them. PART 1: The Written Proposal. The proposal itself-this is the core of the assignment. It should be roughly formatted as follows: 1. Introduction paragraph where you explain the gap in knowledge and introduce your research question (1-2 paragraphs) 2. Literature review (3-5 pages). Utilizing at least 6 academic sources (you can use those from your article analyses) outline the core empirical and conceptual background of the scholarship that is relevant to your topic. It is important that you effectively synthesize the research. This means finding where arguments and points overlap between different pieces and linking them together in the same paragraph, sometimes the same sentence. It also means learning to boil down articles to a few key points and arguments and learning how to line them all up in a logical order. 3. Methods (1-2 pages). Explain what methodology you will be using, why you will be using it, and how you will be using it. You can’t just say that you will do an ethnography or survey project. You need to make a case for why your method is the best method to do so. Provide an overview of the types of how you plan to access your participants/data, questions you plan to ask (if asking questions) and explain why and how that data makes sense for the project you will be looking at. In other words it should all “line up” with everything tied back to your research question. 4. Timeline: A brief timeline of how long you believe it will take to do each stage of the project up to having a full rough draft of the final document. PART 2: Methods Appendix Along with your overall outline for a project and general methodological strategies, a clear, more workable data system is also needed. This will be presented in the form of an appendix, which provides access to your codexes, strategies, etc. Depending on the methodology you use, the appendix will have different requirements. Ethnographies. Field research requires a field site. You need to provide an example of what that site will be, why the site makes sense, as well as an understanding of the social dynamics of the spaces. What will it take for you to “fit in?” How do you plan on overcoming obstacles to doing so? How will you be protecting those that you interact with? In-Depth Interviews. Larger, semi-structured interviews require some open-ended questions provided beforehand. You should provide an outline with at least 3 questions/general areas that you wish to explore. This should be followed by 1-2 pages explaining why you are going to ask those questions and how they will help to generate conductive conversation. (See Weiss pages 49-50)