In this project, students are required to propose a potential research project. A research proposal offers a descriiption of the design of your study, and includes a review of the relevant theoretical, empirical, and methodological literature in your area. In general, the research proposal will contain the same sections as would be seen in a journal article, published in a peer-reviewed journal. In this project, you will NOT gather data or do any analysis, so this is where the research proposal qualitatively differs from a typical published journal article (no results, no discussion/conclusion). As you will technically have no results to report, you will be using a different tense than would be the case in a full manuscriipt (e.g., you will propose to test your hypotheses, instead of actually testing the hypotheses). To reiterate, the proposal simply represents the front end (first three sections) of an empirical manuscriipt: an introduction, a review of the literature, and a detailed section on the data and methods to be used in the project.
A research proposal is tantamount to a technical report, and as such, you should use a formal language, gearing your paper as if it were to be read by a professional (e.g., CJ practitioners, criminologists) audience.
Introduction (2-3 pages). Why should we be interested in this topic? Who cares? What is the purpose in conducting this research? What is the proposed impact of your study? What are you attempting to discover and/or explain? Why should professionals/academics in the field of criminology/criminal justice be interested in your topic/research question? In other words, you should make a concerted effort to explain to your audience why your topic/study is important to them – discuss the significance of this research! It is always a good idea in this section to include descriiptive, statistical evidence of the problem that you are investigating. To make a long story short, you are trying to elicit the reader’s interest in this section – sell your craft! Hint: Pick a topic that interests you.
Literature Review (3-5 pages). In virtually every circumstance, you are not the first scholar to investigate this topic – and even if you are looking at the topic in a unique way, others have likely conducted research in your general area. As such, the literature review offers a thorough rendering of what others have said/found about your topic. In essence, the review of the literature provides the narrative of your topic – it tells the story. The literature review not only offers an overview of the current empirical status of your topic, but it is also an excellent opportunity for the researcher to uncover gaps in the extant literature, or to generate new ideas. Many of my own studies are birthed by conducting a review of the literature within a given area.
For purposes of this project, students are strongly encouraged to find 8-10 professional sources (e.g., published articles/books/book chapters). The articles should be scholarly, peer-reviewed, research articles that are published in a refereed journal. The sources should be selected based on their relevance to your study: either on methodological or theoretical/conceptual grounds. When conducting the review of the literature, be sure to properly, and frequently, cite your sources throughout (APA or ASA format is required), refraining from the overuse of direct quotes – i.e., paraphrase these works by putting it in your own words.
It is imperative that your literature review flows, or transitions, smoothly. In other words, please refrain from issuing a blow-by-blow account of the studies that you have selected — that is what an annotated bibliography does. Toward this end, you should incorporate the use of transitional sentences and paragraphs (start with an opening paragraph that introduces the literature review), that offer a nice segue as you move between topics. As you are concluding your literature review, you should offer a summary of the current state of the extant literature in your area. Here, you should articulate some of the gaps in the literature or limitations of previous work – and hopefully how your particular study will explicitly address some of these limitations. In other words, this is the transitional period of the proposal, in which you move from previous studies to your own study.
Either at the end of your literature review, or the very beginning of the data and methods section, you should include your hypothesis(es) – an explicit statement statement about the relationship between your independent and dependent variable(s). This can be done in a few (2-3) sentences. The literature review will generally inform your hypothesis.
Data and Methods (2-3 pages). This section is the most formulaic and technical of the proposal. First, you begin by describing the data that will be used in your study. Who will be the participants? Where will the data be collected? How (questionnaire, interviews, participant observation, ethnography, content analysis) will the data be collected? Will the data be publicly available (if so, describe the original data collection), or will you have to independently collect your own? If you are collecting your own data, describe the procedures that will be involved to get the data (for example, if you are conducting a qualitative study, how long will you be interviewing your participants? How many times will you observe them? How many people will be observed?). What is the unit of analysis (i.e., individuals, groups, social artifacts, etc.) ? What is the target population? How will you sample the population, given that you cannot access the entire population? How generalizeable will the results be, coming from this sample? Discuss potential advantages and disadvantages of this research design.
In the methods portion of the data and methods section, students should begin by restating their hypothesis. Next, offer a clear, explicit articulation of the procedures (operationalization strategy) that will be employed to measure your independent and dependent variables, as well as 5 control variables (usually demographic variables like sex, age, class, education, race).
Lastly, you need to include a brief section on the analytic strategy that will be used in your research. For instance, will you be conducting quantitative research, and if so, what types of statistical analyses will be conducted?
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