How to Write a Research Proposal; 11 Things to Include In A Thesis Proposal
Alright, so today let’s talk about how to write a research proposal, what should be in it? Whether it is a research proposal for a bachelor study or a master study or PhD project, roughly speaking, the general steps are similar, and the main components are more or less the same. So in this article, let’s talk about these general stuff, roughly speaking.
First, here’s an obvious question.
What is a research proposal? What does it do? When do we’re writing a research proposal? When essentially just proposing to do a research study, we need to tell the reader what is it that we want to research?
What is the question that we want to have answered? And how this question will be investigated and answered. That is what a research proposal does for us to clearly propose our research ideas to the supervisor, or the professor or the manager, or whoever it is, who’s going to read and hopefully approve the proposal. And that is also why we need to write a research proposal before doing a research study.
Now, what is the first step in writing a research proposal? If we look at how people start writing a research proposal, most students will probably start with a topic in mind. Usually, when I meet my students for the first time and ask them, What do you want to research about, they would normally have an idea which is good, they would have a topic in mind, or they have some ideas in which they’re interested. Or they might have some kind of a personal story or anecdote, which represents a general research topic that they want to go into.
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And this is a great starting point. So really, the first step in writing a research proposal or designing a research study is to have or choose a topic, which is of interest to you. But having a topic in mind is really not enough. Nobody can do a research study on a topic.
A topic is too general, it’s too broad. It’s too wide. It’s too nonspecific. How can we collect analyze empirical data to address something so general and broad? We’ve got to take this general broad topic and narrow it down into a researchable question.
Define Our Research Study
Well, how can we do that? The best way and maybe the only way some people would argue to do that is to read about it. The idea behind academic empirical research is that no matter what topic we’re thinking of, chances are there have been plenty of people who wrote about it researched about it, so it is our job as the researcher to read those literature.
It is only through reading relevant literature on our topic and related topics. Can we know what has been done on this topic already? It is only through reviewing relevant literature can we decide on a specific area to focus on or a particular direction to go into from within this general topic, which we’re interested in?
After we have conducted our literature review or preliminary literature review for the proposal, we can decide on what specifically this proposed study is going to investigate.
In other words, at this point, we’re going to define our research study. Research definition can come in different forms. Sometimes it is formulating a problem statement and a bunch of research questions.
Or maybe your professor will ask you to develop a central research question and a number of investigative questions. Or maybe you will be asked to conceptualize a model for testing. Or perhaps you will be asked to develop hypotheses so that they can be empirically tested.
Or maybe your professor will ask you to do a combination of the things that I just mentioned. But regardless, the idea is to clearly define what this proposed study is going to investigate, be it in the form of questions or hypotheses or models or any other way, shape or form.
Formulation of main research questions
You will notice here that research definition or the formulation of main research questions is generally done after the literature review, which means our central research questions shouldn’t be answered by the lit review. They should be answered through the collection and analysis of empirical data. I mean, if your research questions can all be perfectly answered just by reading literature, tax books and articles, then what is really the point of conducting empirical research? Okay, now that we know what our proposed study is going to investigate,
Methodological Decisions for This Proposed Study
Next, we need to decide on how this investigation can be carried out. In other words, we need to make some methodological decisions for this proposed study. In this method or methodology section of the research proposal. Most universities and colleges would probably ask for the following aspects to be clarified, research design, data collection, instrument, sample, procedure, plan, data analysis, ethical considerations, and maybe budget. So let’s take a look at them all.
Under research design, you’re expected to explain which type of research your proposed study is going to fall under, is it exploratory, descriptive, correlational, causal etc. There are different kinds of research topologies and research designs and for those of you who are interested, I have several other articles on this topic.
We need to be able to determine what type of research it is and motivate why it is so, and that is why many times research design or research type needs to be clarified as the first element of the method chapter. Because after all, the type of research may indicate or even dictate to a large extent, what methodological approaches are required.
We also need to indicate in the proposal what kind of empirical data is needed for this study, and how we are going to collect those data. For most business management, economics and social sciences programs, students are still required to collect some empirical data in their thesis research.
In other words, most of the time, we cannot just do a big literature review, and then call it our research thesis. So in the proposal, we need to clearly say whether we need qualitative data or quantitative data, or both, and why do we need them?
And with that, of course, we also need to describe how we’re going to collect these data;
Will we create a survey? Are we going to interview people? Or will we conduct observation or perform experiments or use other data collection instruments? Not only do we need to decide on what instrument to use, we also need to preliminary develop this instrument so that the reader can see that this developed data collection instrument can actually collect all the necessary data. Address our research questions.
We also need to indicate in this methodology section from whom we’re going to collect data. In other words, who is going to be our sample? Generally speaking, we’re expected to describe the population, the sample and the sampling procedure.
For instance, we might say that our research population is all employees of a certain organization. Well, a portion of this population will be taken as the sample via a stratified sampling procedure.
Oftentimes, we’re also required to motivate or justify why that is. So why do we use this sample? And why do we use a particular sampling procedure? I spoke about various sampling procedures in another article.
Data Collection Procedure
Another element we need to describe in the methodology section is data collection procedure. In other words, how well the instrument be used on the sample.
For instance,
What is the time frame for the data collection? How will the respondents be approached? In what kind of settings will the data collection be administered? And what are the different steps involved in this process?
And then we also need to describe in the proposal how we plan to analyze the collected data.
For quantitative data,
What kind of statistical software and analytical procedures will be used for qualitative data, what type of coding is required?
And how will the data be interpreted?
In the plan data analysis section, we need to clearly describe what we are going to do in order to analyze the data. And we need to convince the reader that we are capable of handling the data properly. After that, we might need to talk a little bit about research ethics.
And once again, depending on the university, there may be different requirements to address ethical issues. This can be sometimes just a simple formality. Or this can be a real key consideration for the proposal.
For example, for my own undergraduate research, this was just a couple of small paragraphs that I promised that will treat the data confidentially that participation in the study was strictly voluntary, that no payment would be made to the respondents things like that.
But for my doctoral research proposal, this was a much bigger deal, I had to sign a scientific researcher ethical code of conduct. My proposal had to be reviewed and approved by an ethics committee.
So ethics was a much bigger deal for my doctoral research project. But in general, if you’re writing a research proposal for your own bachelor’s or master’s thesis, this section wouldn’t be too difficult.
Just follow the instructions given by your faculty and most likely, you will be fine. And then budget. This is also something that’s more of a formality because for most bachelor’s and master’s dissertations, you are the one who has to pay for the costs involved in carrying out the research.
So it is really your own money for everything. But of course, it is good that you list out everything and calculate how much money you might need to spend. Obviously, for a real commercial or governmental research project proposal, this budget section will have a lot more practical value.
And finally, sometimes you might also need to put into the proposal a planning chapter in which you indicate a clear time planning for various steps involved in the research project.
And usually this will come with some kind of visual illustration, maybe a Gantt chart or something like that to show that all the main components and steps are carefully and clearly planned out. So in conclusion, these are the main sections of research proposal. Good luck writing your own. And as always, thanks for reading, please join our forum to follow discussions, I’ll see you next time.
Keyword
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