How to Prepare a

Research Proposal
Research Process
 Proposal…
• The objective in writing a proposal is to describe what you
will do, why it should be done, how you will do it and
what you expect will result. Being clear about these things
from the beginning will help you complete your thesis in a
timely fashion.
• A vague, weak or fuzzy proposal can lead to a long,
painful, and often unsuccessful thesis writing exercise. A
clean, well thought-out, proposal forms the backbone for
the thesis itself. The structures are identical and through
the miracle of word-processing, your proposal will
probably become your thesis.
 …Cont’d
• A good thesis proposal hinges on a good idea. Once you have a
good idea, you can draft the proposal in an evening. Getting a
good idea hinges on familiarity with the topic. This assumes a
longer preparatory period of reading, observation, discussion,
and incubation. Read everything that you can in your area of
interest. Figure out what are the important and missing parts of
our understanding. Figure out how to build/discover those
pieces. Live and breath the topic. Talk about it with anyone
who is interested. Then just write the important parts as the
proposal. Filling in the things that we do not know and that will
help us know more: that is what research is all about.
THE CONTENTS OF A PROPOSAL
• Title: This should be short and explanatory.
• The Introduction: Topic Area
– A good title will clue the reader into the topic but it can not tell the
whole story.
– Follow the title with a strong introduction.
– The introduction provides a brief overview that tells a fairly well
informed (but perhaps non-specialist) reader what the proposal is about.
It might be as short as a single page, but it should be very clearly
written, and it should let one assess whether the research is relevant to
their own. With luck it will hook the reader's interest.
– What is your proposal about? Setting the topical area is a start but you
need more, and quickly. Get specific about what your research will
address.
 Questions to address in preparing your research
proposal

• 1. Background/Introduction:
– Why is this research important?
– What other studies have there been in this area?
– How will this research add to knowledge in this
area?
– What do you want to find out?
– What is the main question you wish to answer?
– What are the specific questions you will ask to
address the main question?
 Problem Definition
• After having discussions with the professionals as well as with
the persons to whom the issue relates, and the review of
literature, the researcher is in a position to narrow down from
its original broad base and define the issue clearly. Translate
the broad issue into a research question. As part of the applied
research convert the management dilemma into a
management question, and then on to research question that
fits the need to resolve the dilemma. The symptoms of a
problem might help tracing the real problem. For example a
productivity decline of workers may be an issue. The
management may have tried to solve it by the provision of
incentive but did not work. The researcher may have to dig
deep and find the possible factors like the morale and
motivation of the workers having some other antecedents.
 Objectives

• Many research proposal formats will ask for only one

or two aims and may not require objectives.
However, for some research these will need to be
broken down in more depth to also include the
objectives.
• The aim is the overall driving force of the research
and the objectives are the means by which you intend
to achieve the aims. These must be clear and succinct.
 Methodology/methods
• For research at postgraduate level you may need to split the methodology
and methods section into two. However, for most projects they can be
combined. In this section you need to describe your proposed research
methodology and methods and justify their use. Why have you decided
upon your methodology? Why have you decided to use those particular
methods? Why are other methods not appropriate?
• This section needs to include details about samples, numbers of people to
be contacted, method of data collection, methods of data analysis and
ethical considerations.
• If you have chosen a less well known methodology, you may need to spend
more time justifying your choice than you would need to if you had chosen
a more traditional methodology. This section should be quite detailed –
many funding organisations find that the most common reason for proposal
failure is the lack of methodological detail.
 Data Collection
• This might include the field site description, a
description of the instruments you will use, and
particularly the data that you anticipate collecting.
You may need to comment on site and resource
accessibility in the time frame and budget that you
have available, 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 manipulate the data that you assembled to
get at the information that you will use to
answer your question. It will include the
statistical 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.
• How you will do? Will you be doing this research on your
own or with others? your research
• Have you provided full details of anyone else you intend to
carry out this research with, including fieldworkers?
• Who are you targeting in this research? How many people or
case files do you intend to interview or read through?
• Where will the research take place?
• Will participants be clearly and fully informed of the purpose of
the research study? How will you do this? How will participants
be clear about the expectations of the researcher?
• Do you have an information sheet and a consent form for
participants? Supervisory arrangements - how do you intend
your research to be supervised and monitored and by whom?
Who will be funding your research?
 Cont’d
• What sort of data will you be collecting - e.g.
are you intending to count numbers, talk to
people directly or a mixture of the two? What
is the main method you will use to carry out
the research - e.g. questionnaire, face-to-face
interviews, focus groups, paper reviews etc.?
How will you select your sample? How will
you recruit your sample? How will you collect
your data? Will you be paying participants?
 Significance

• Why is this work important? Show why this is it

important to answer this question. What are the
implications of doing it? How does it link to other
knowledge? How does it stand to inform policy making?
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. It should also tell me why I
would want to support, or fund, the project.
 Literature Review
• 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 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 need not be exhaustive, only relevant.
 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. Some

advisors like exhaustive lists. I think that the
Graduate Division specifies that you call it
"Bibliography". Others like to see only the
literature which you actually cite. Most fall in
between: there is no reason to cite irrelevant
literature but it may be useful to keep track of
it even if only to say that it was examined and
found to be irrelevant.
 WHATMAKES AGOODPROPOSAL?
• Relevance, either to the work of the funding body or to
the student’s course.
• The research is unique, or offers new insight or
development.
• The title, aims and objectives are all clear and succinct.
• Comprehensive and thorough background research and
literature review has been undertaken.
• There is a good match between the issues to be
addressed and the approach being adopted.
 Cont’d
• The researcher demonstrates relevant
background knowledge and/or experience.
• Timetable, resources and budget have all been
worked out thoroughly, with most eventualities
covered.
• Useful policy and practice implications.
 REASONSWHY RESEARCHPROPOSALS
FAIL
• Aims and objectives are unclear or vague.
• There is a mismatch between the approach being adopted
and the issues to be addressed.
• The overall plan is too ambitious and difficult to achieve
in the timescale.
• The researcher does not seem to have conducted enough
in-depth background research.
• Problem is of insufficient importance.
• Information about the data collection is insufficiently
detailed.
• Information about the data analysis method is
insufficiently detailed.
• Timescale is inappropriate or unrealistic.
• Resources and budget have not been carefully
thought out.
• This topic has been done too many times
before – indicates a lack in background
research.
 Tips and Tricks

• Read. Read everything you can find in your area of

interest. Read. Read. Read. Take notes, and talk to
your advisor about the topic. If your advisor won't
talk to you, find another one or rely on 'the net' for
intellectual interaction. Email has the advantage of
forcing you to get your thoughts into written words
that can be refined, edited and improved. It also gets
time stamped records of when you submitted what
to your advisor and how long it took to get a
response.
• Write about the topic a lot, and don't be afraid to tear up
(delete) passages that just don't work. Often you can re-
think and re-type faster than you can edit your way out
of a hopeless mess. The advantage is in the re-thinking.
• 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.
• Use some systematic way of recording notes and
bibliographic information from the very beginning. The
classic approach is a deck of index cards. You can sort,
regroup, layout spatial arrangements and work on the
beach. Possibly a slight improvement is to use a word-
processor file that contains bibliographic reference
information and notes, quotes etc. that you take from the
source. This can be sorted, searched, diced and sliced in
your familiar word-processor. You may even print the
index cards from the word-processor if you like the
ability to physically re-arrange things.
• 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. The
length to shoot for is "equivalent to a published
paper", Forty pages of double spaced text, plus figures
tables, table of contents, references, etc. is probably all
you need. In practice, most theses try to do too much
and become too long. Cover your topic, but don't
confuse it with too many loosely relevant side lines.
• This is not complete and needs a little rearranging.
• The balance between Introduction and Literature
Review needs to be thought out. The reader will want
to be able to figure out whether to read the proposal.
The literature review should be sufficiently inclusive
that the reader can tell where the bounds of knowledge
lie. It should also show what has been done and what
seem to be accepted approaches in the field and the
kinds of results that are being gotten.
• The balance may change between the proposal
and the thesis. It is common, although not
really desirable, for theses to make reference
to every slightly related piece of work that can
be found. This is not necessary. Refer to the
work that actually is linked to your study, don't
go too far afield (unless your committee is
adamant that you do ;-).