Overview
SOC 20
Guidelines for the final research assignment
The final assignment requires you to write a research proposal to addressa question (or questions) you want to explore. A proposal describes a research project you plan to carry out but have not had a chance to actually collect or analyze the data. You are free to choose any research question(s) as long as it (they) can be answered with data you can potentially collect. You can propose collecting original data or usingexisting data (e.g., survey data, government statistics, printed texts, cultural artifacts, etc.) to answer your question(s). Make sure you are explicit about your data source(s). For example, if you expect to use data from an existing survey, you should provide the name of the survey and the relevant questions included in the survey. If you expect to conduct your own survey, you need to explain how you expect to find subjects and which questions you will ask them. In the following, I provide more details about whatthe research proposal needs to include.
1) Length: approximately 5 double-spaced pages (12 point font size, 1-1.25-inch margins), excluding tables/figures/bibliography. Slightly longer or shorter is fine, so long as you cover all the important issues in the paper. If you decide to include tables or figures, you should label them clearly and refer to them as Table 1, Table 2, Figure 1, Figure 2, etc., in the text.
2) Organization of the report:
■ Introduction: It provides the purposeand overviewof the paper.In this part you should describe your research question(s) and explain why it is (they are) important. You may want to use other people’s research findings to justify the importance of your research topic/questions(i.e., previous research has found the issue of concern has important consequences on certain people/things).
■ Literature review: A research report/proposal usually contains aseparate literature review section, in whichthe author discusses what has been done by other researchers about the chosen topic and what has been missing (which makes it necessary to ask the chosen research question(s)).For this project, however, you only need to provide five peer-reviewed referencesfor research done on your topic (but more references are welcome too). I do not expect you to identify a gap in previous research, but if you could motivate your proposal that way, it would be excellent. Because your literature review will not be comprehensive, it is OK to be relatively short (i.e., 1-1.5 pages). In this section,you should also discuss the hypothesesfor your research question(s) based on existing studies. The introduction and literature review sections together should be no longer than half of your entire text.
■ Study design: In this section, you shouldprovide details about your data source, give examples of your survey or in-depth interview questions, and indicate the population you intend to focus on and the number of subjects you want to include in the sample. You need to define the key conceptsin your study and state how you will measure these concepts. If you expect to conduct an experiment, explain what you intend to do in your experiment. If you plan to conduct an ethnographic study, explain how you will select cases and obtain access to the study site. Regardless of the method you choose, you should always discuss how you plan to recruit subjects. If you propose to use existing survey data, you need to discuss the survey questions that you will use to create variables in your analysis.
■ Discussions: unlike usual research proposals, I ask you to add a specific discussion about why your proposed research methods are useful for testing the hypotheses you propose early on. Please discuss why your proposed method is better than all other possible methods we have introduced in class. All research methods have their own strengths and weaknesses. Our decision regarding which method to use often depends on the research questions we have. Why is the method you chose best suited for your research question(s)?
■ Bibliography: Make sure you put together a bibliography for any reference you cite in the report. Any existing, commonly used style is fine.
■ Tables and Figures: Most proposalsmay not need tables or figures, but you can use them to illustrate your research design or provide information about your survey, etc.I encourage you to include tables and figures at the end, with one table/figure per sheet, instead of inserting the tables/figures in the text (unless the tables/figures are very small). Make sure all tables/figures are numbered and with brief descriptions about what they are(e.g. “Table 1: desired characteristics of the sample”).
3) Your proposal will be graded based on whether you have provided all the elements indicated here; whether the proposed methods can reasonably address your research questions; whether you make convincing arguments in various parts of the paper (concerning the importance of your topic, links between research questions and hypotheses, connections between hypotheses and proposed methods, additional discussion on why the method is preferred, etc.); and the overall clarity/quality of writing.
4) Using AI for any part of the project is unacceptable and will be considered as cheating