3/30/22, 10:04 PM Proposal Assignment #2: Proposed Study, RQs, and Method
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Proposal Assignment #2: Proposed Study, RQs, and
Method
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Research Proposal Assignment #2
You will complete this assignment as if you were writing the current study and Method section of a
research proposal. Please see the examples I’ve provided.
PROPOSED STUDY
Similar to how you ended you’re Assignment #1 – your Current Study section should provide the
rationale for why your study is important (what gaps exist in the literature). Then introduce your study
and topic area, followed by your research questions. At this point, your research questions need to be
more developed. You need to ask a minimum of 2 questions and they must be answerable within the
same study with the same method and sample. Also, as discussed, we are not including broad
exploratory or descriptive-only (e.g., What to people think about murders?) research questions for our
proposals. They must include at least two variables and propose some sort of relationship between them
(e.g., How does X relate to Y?, Are women more likely than men to ___?, Does X, Y, or Z predict
successful rehabilitation from __?).
METHOD
Your method section must contain 3 sections: (1) Participants (or Sample), (2) Design (or Procedure),
(3) Materials (or Instruments or Measures), (4) Appendix A. Below, I outline what is required in each
section. To better understand the data collection process, you are required to develop a study that uses
either surveys, interviews, or gathers secondary data from corrections or police. The materials requires
you to show first describe the exact tools you’ll be using (e.g., scales or items for survey, interview
protocol and items for interviews, or list of variables and measurement descriptors if requesting data
from a secondary source). If you use a scale from an existing course, you must cite them. It is always
recommended you use existing questions and scales (don’t reinvent the wheel). Be sure to look at the
examples I provide to write up these sections.
(1) Participants
Number of participants (or other) that will be sampled. If you’re doing a survey, how many people will
take it? If you’re interviewing, how many people will you interview? If you’re asking for data about
3/30/22, 10:04 PM Proposal Assignment #2: Proposed Study, RQs, and Method
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crime rates or offenders, how many “cases” will you look at?
All exclusion and inclusion criteria for your sample.
Tell me as much as you can about them!
(2) Design
Here you’ll talk about what the study will actually look like. So, explain if you’re taking a qualitative
(interviews) or quantitative (survey or secondary data) approach. If you’re conducting an experiment,
be sure to specify that. Explain your data collection strategy.
The design is basically where you tell the story about what you’re doing in your study. It should be in
chronological order of steps. So after you tell me the general things and begin talking about your
data collection strategy, think step-by-step. How will you know who to reach out to? How will you
reach them. What will you say? Will you incentivize participation? What happens when they agree to
be a part of the study? What are they doing when they are actually doing the study (e.g., if it’s an
interview, who is interviewing them – for how long – where – is it recorded, etc)?
Data collection strategy
(3) Materials
In this section, you’ll describe your data collection tools. If it’s a survey, will it be online or on paper?
How long will it take? How many questions? What will those questions be about? Typically you’ll
divide this up into how you’ll measure various things (e.g., if you’re measuring someone’s selfesteem you’ll want a sub-heading that explains what scale instrument you’re using to measure that).
Your first section should be about demographic items to be examined (you need demographic
info regardless of your method – how you collect it and which specific items you care about may
differ).
If you’re doing a survey – talk about the specific questions, scales, and variables you’re
measuring. If you’re doing an interview – describe your interview protocol. If you’re doing
secondary data analyses – explain which variables you are requesting and what the data should
look like (e.g., we are requesting gender data which should specify whether the youth identifies
as male, female, or other).
Reference to an Appendix A – which is where you will list all of your questions/scales in your study.
(4) Appendix A
List of survey questions, interview protocol, or list of measures from archival data and where you will
find them. So, the materials is where you describe the instruments and this is where you actually
provide the full thing. Must include all of the specifics. If you say in your method that your interview
will consist of 10 open-ended questions. You must list those 10 open-ended questions here.
For example if you are going to ask about gender. Do not simply say “1. gender” in the appendix.
Instead write something like:
1. What is your gender?
a. Male
3/30/22, 10:04 PM Proposal Assignment #2: Proposed Study, RQs, and Method
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B. Female
C. Other (please specify) ______________.
Below are examples of proposals submitted in my previous courses and of research articles. Look at the
METHOD SECTION only to get examples of what is expected of you in this assignment.
Final_Proposal_Bullying.pdf (this is a full proposal with my feedback).
Example Method (earned a B).docx (this is just a method section and appendix with my feedback).
Example from Dissertation – Recruitment and Measures Only.docx (this example is only part of
the method and measures. I mostly wanted to provide this as a good example of how you would
write up and organize the different parts of your questionnaire, by variables, and what they may look
like in the appendix. This is obviously MUCH MORE than is expected, yours would be must smaller
than this).