Effective Research Proposals
What is an effective research
proposal? It is a proposal that (1) gets
accepted and (2) is a useful guide for conducting your study after it is accepted. The basic steps of an effective proposal are almost always the same whether the proposal is for a
grant application, a doctoral dissertation, or an evaluation of a project. And, the criteria for effectiveness are virtually
identical whether it is called a plan, design, or proposal. The basic outlines of the are very similar.
In virtually all cases, it is much better
to have a detailed plan, which you have to revise as you go along, than to
start a research project with only a vague idea of what you are going to do. Your time is too valuable to waste in aimless wandering.
There are 7 basic components or steps of a
good research proposal. I have listed those steps in a logical order below. And, this is
the order you would probably use to outline your proposal--and to communicate the results of your
research. But in the actual practice of
conducting your research, you might need to revisit earlier steps, often more
than once. For example, when something
goes wrong in the sampling plan (step 4) a way to get ideas for fixing it is to
re-review previous research (step 2) to see how other investigators have dealt
with your problem.
1. A
research question.
2. A
review of previous research.
3. A
plan for collecting data/evidence.
4. A
sampling and/or recruiting plan
5. A
research ethics plan.
6. A
coding and/or measurement plan.
7. An
analysis and interpretation plan
1. A research question. A good research question has to be
researchable, meaning you could conceivably answer it with research. Considerable explanation about why it is a
good research question—it’s researchable and it’s important—is needed in an
effective research proposal.
2. A
review of previous research.
This helps you avoid reinventing the wheel, or even worse, the flat
tire. A review is also a source of many
ideas about the subsequent stages of the proposal: on how to collect data, from
whom to collect it, the ethical implications of your data collection plan, and
finally approaches to coding and analysis.
3. A plan for collecting data/evidence. There are 6 basic ways to collect data: (1)
surveying, (2) interviewing, (3) experimenting, (4) observing in natural
settings, (5) collecting archival/secondary data, and (6) combining ways (1) through (5)
in various ways. You also need to explain why your choice of a data collection plan is a
good one for answering your research question and, implicitly, why one of the
others would not be better.
4. Sampling and/or recruiting plan. This describes from whom, how, where, and how
much evidence you are going to collect.
In other terms: Who or what are
you going to study? How many of them? How much data from each of them? How will
they be selected?
5. A plan for conducting research ethically. This plan tries to anticipate any ethical problems
and prepares for how to deal with them.
Once you know what you will gather, how, and from whom, then before you go ahead, you need to review
your plan to see if there are any ethical constraints arising from participants’
privacy and consent and potential harms. At this stage, your plan includes preparing for IRB review.
6. Coding. Coding is assigning labels (words, numbers,
or other symbols) to your data so that you can define, index, and sort your
evidence. It is in coding phase that the issues of distinctions of quant/qual/mixed become most prominent. You may have made this coding decision in mind early
on—perhaps you are phobic about numbers, or maybe you find verbal data
annoyingly vague. You may actually start
with this as your first divider, but it would not be effective to write your proposal that
way—by saying, for example: “I like to
interview people and numbers give me the creeps, so I don’t want to do survey
research” or “I’m shy and I don’t want to have to interact in face-to-face
interviews, so I want to do secondary analysis of data.”
7. Analysis and interpretation. This tends to be the skimpiest part of a
research proposal. But if you know what
you are going to collect from whom and how you will code it, your first 6 steps really do shape (not completely determine) the analysis options open to you.
