The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with experience in designing a sound research study and writing a research prospectus. The benefits are both academic and professional, as this is a common genre in academia and business. Research prospectuses are regularly required for everything from grant applications to governmental agencies and private foundations to Master’s theses and Doctoral dissertations. Your goal in any such prospectus is to convince the reviewer(s) of the merits and feasibility of your project. If you are unable to develop your ideas with sufficient care and write about them precisely and persuasively, you won’t get the grant or have your research, job bid, or other project approved.
In general, a research prospectus is your official proposal of a research project and is designed to persuade readers (a professor or research committee, a project coordinator, grant-making agency, or similar) of the capacity for executing the research and that it will yield worthwhile results. It is useful for planning the research (and for getting critical feedback before undertaking the study) as well as a resource to mine while conducting a study. The process is recursive. As you design your research, you will be guided in part by your review of the literature (synthesis), and will no doubt continue to review relevant scholarship in your research area and your proposed methods.
Effective research prospectuses share several key elements:
Introduction
What background information does the reader need in order to understand the prospectus? This section orients the reader to the ensuing document.
Articulation of the problem or topic
Discuss some or all of the following. What specific problem(s) or topic(s) will your research treat? What rationale can you offer for this project? Why is this problem or topic significant? Whom will it interest? What areas or questions will you cover and what will you exclude—in other words, what is the scope of the project? This section not only states the problem or topic, but indicates how and why it might matter to the field of writing studies. In this section you should answer what is commonly called the “so what” question.
Review of relevant literature (with a bibliography–MLA or APA–appended)
Include an overview of existing scholarship on the topic of your study, summarizing basic arguments relevant to the project. Also, position the project with reference to the scholarship you discuss. What previous research is relevant to your project? How does your project relate to and move beyond what has been done by others? What kinds of gaps or dissonances have you discovered in previous research and how will your work address them? What areas of previous research support your work? This section locates your project within existing research in your field. The prospectus must convince readers that the project is sufficiently connected to established work in the field to be relevant to the discipline and that the project offers sufficient new knowledge to be worth pursuing.
Research question(s)
Your specific research question(s) should be stated clearly either at the end of the description of the problem/objective or at the end of the review of the literature. These should be clearly stated with operational definitions provided, as needed. What are the precise goals or objectives of your study? What specific questions will you attempt to answer? This section gives the reader a clear sense of what your project will achieve. (It may repeat, in a more concise and/or specific form, material included in previous sections.)
Plan of research
The kind(s) of analysis you plan will depend on the subjects, the measures, and the data collection as well as on your research question. These all work in tandem with one another. Consider: what do you propose to do in order to answer your research questions? What theoretical and/or historical context(s) will you use to pursue those questions? What kinds of evidence will you use? On which central texts will you draw? This section shows the reader that you have a feasible and well-thought-out plan for developing your study’s argument and a well-thought-out research design. To make this case, you will need to specify the following in some detail (as appropriate):
Research hypotheses
Participants (if applicable, how you will select them; what kind of permission you will need to obtain).
Methodology — how and why you will approach the research (will you focus on institutional structures? Will you focus on first-person experiences through interviews or oral histories? Will you address complex racial relations? And so forth)?
Data gathering methods.
Data analysis methods (including means of assuring reliability and/or any statistical treatments you plan to use and/or approaches to analyzing qualitative data).
Timeline
What specific activities do you plan to carry out and how much time will you spend on each? When do you plan to finish each stage? This section demonstrates that you can complete the project in a timely manner.
Bibliography
Include a Works Cited (MLA) or References (APA) page of all sources cited in the research proposal, including primary source documents or other primary artifacts (interviewee information, etc.). Double check your bibliography against the proposal to make sure that all sources appear in both places.
Appendices
The prospectus may also, of course, include additional information that will assist readers in estimating the value and practicality of the topic. Include additional elements such as preliminary research examples, interview questions, and informed consent forms in appendix pages. Use capital letters to identify each appendix (A, B, etc.).
*Remember that a prospectus is an informative and persuasive document: clarity, concision, and thoroughness are crucial.
There is no page limit requirement for the prospectus, since different projects will require different amounts of information and clarification. However, a prospectus for a project this size will generally run 8-15 double-spaced pages. The Research Prospectuses will be assessed based on the following criteria:
Appropriate articulation of the problem/context for the proposed research project
Articulation of a research question that responds to the synthesis of the existing scholarly literature
Effective alignment of the proposed methods with the research question
Appropriate format and organization of the research proposal
Feasibility of the proposed research schedule
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