Senior Seminar Proposal Assignment

Senior Seminar

Proposal Assignment

The purpose of this assignment is to help you to visualize and plan out your research project. You will write up a plan of how you propose to conduct your research.  This requires you to have a focused research question, and idea of what others have written on the topic, and an idea of how you will collect the data necessary for you to be able to answer your research question. Here is a model for a very brief (maybe five paragraph) research proposal. Writing this will help you narrow down your focus for your research project.

• In the first paragraph, the first sentence identifies the general topic area. The second sentence gives the research question, and the third sentence establishes its significance.
• The next 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 written on the topic and what have they found? Allocate about a sentence per important person or finding. Include any preliminary findings you have, and indicate what open questions are left. Restate your question in this context, showing how it fits into this larger picture.
• The next paragraph describes your methodology. It tells how you will approach the question and what you will need to do it.
• The final paragraph outlines your expected results, how you will interpret them, and how they will fit into our larger understanding i.e., 'the literature'

The Sections of the Proposal

The Introduction

Topic Area (a few sentences)

A good title will clue the reader into the topic but it cannot tell the whole story. Follow the title with a short introduction. The introduction provides a brief overview that tells a reader what the proposal is about. It should be very clearly written, and it should let one assess whether the research is relevant to their own work. What is your proposal about? Briefly describe the general topic and quickly come to the question that your research will address. Show why this research question is important to answer.

Research Question

 Once the topic is established, come right to the point. What are you going to do? What specific issue or question will your work address? What will we learn from your work?

Significance of Research (a few sentences)

Why is this work important? What are the implications of doing it? How does it link to other knowledge? This should show how this project is significant to our body of knowledge. Why is it important to our understanding of the world? It should establish why I would want to read on.

Literature Review (this will be very brief, and you can build upon it later)

State of our knowledge

The purpose 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 needs simply to show how your work will benefit the whole. It should provide the theoretical basis for your work, show what has been done in the area by others, and set the stage for your work. In a literature review you should give the reader enough ties to the literature that they feel confident that you have found, read, and assimilated the literature in the field. It should probably move from the more general to the more focused studies, but again, it need not be exhaustive, only relevant. You can discuss any literature you are aware of, or devise a plan for what types of articles you will seek in the next assignments. Make sure you mention a theoretical framework that can be used to examine this topic. 

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 place 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. Look in the conclusion of the article to see if they suggest directions for future research. This is where you are identifying gaps in the literature that your study will fill. As you are just beginning your search for literature, you may not be able to address this right now; that is OK.

Methodology (try to be as detailed here as you can, and expect feedback)

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 you will use to address it.

Data Collection

 This might include the field site description (where you will collect data), a description of the instruments you will use (how you will collect data: Surveys? Interviews?), and particularly the data that you anticipate collecting. You may need to comment on site and resource accessibility in the time frame that you have available (meaning, how will you access the population you want to survey/interview?), 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 analyze the data that you assembled to get at the information that you will use to answer your research question. It will include the statistical model, coding approach, or other techniques and the tools that you will use in processing the data. It probably should also include an indication of the range 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 theory and questions that you have raised. It will be a good place to summarize 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 that you have cited.  Make sure that you are using the APA Style OR the ASA Style.  Chapter 7 in your textbook discusses how to cite using the APA Style. 

Tips:

Very 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. Modify them as needed as your understanding increases.

Another pointer is to keep in mind from the outset that this project is neither the last 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. Again, the goal is to be concise: cover your topic, but don't confuse it with too many loosely relevant side lines. Don’t pressure yourself too much!