Research Proposal- Social Research Methods Class

(Part 1) A

1) A Title Page (Usually with a Question)

2) Statement of your research interest

· Personal

· Policy

· Academic

3) Literature Review

· Focus on peer-reviewed journals

· Google is not a good place [e.g., Pro-quest, Thompson Gail, etc. ]

· Learn how to narrow down your search [e.g. and]

· Confined yourself within the study of Abstracts.

· Choose a handful of articles on the basis of your abstract study.

· Be selective in choosing books.

Then you write the literature review [like a lawyer you make your case]:

· Identify theories (their strength and weakness) & their world-view (paradigm).

· Identify methodologies and data collection (their strength and weakness]

· The conclusion will be your theory or almost the theory

4) State your theory (implicit or explicit)

Part 1 B

Fact and Theory

1) Theory

Theory Hypothesis -> Concept Conceptualization Operationalization

2) Hypothesis

a) What we mean by the term Hypothesis

· It makes a theory Testable

· It predicts/guess an outcome in an experiment/research/process

c) Usually Hypothesis is designed in terms of Cause & Effect. [If X then Y]

· Always cause comes first and effect comes second (time order)

· Cause is the Independent Variable (IV) and effect is the Dependent Variable (DV)

d) Ceteris paribus: (X Y provided all other variables remain constant)

e) Two types of cause: i) Necessary Cause

ii) Sufficient Cause

f) i) Null Hypothesis H0

ii) Alternative Hypothesis HA

3) Concept: (A Mental Image of something physical or abstract).

4) Conceptualization: (The process of specifying the concept, e.g. Religiosity, Love, etc.).

5) Operationalization: (The process of assigning values (numbers) to the Conceptualized items.)

With values comes the issue of Measurement: i) Nominal, ii) Ordinal, iii) Interval, & iv) Ratio.

Here comes the issue of Validity and Reliability

6) Questionnaire construction [in case of Survey Research]

Developing Expermental, control, and comparison groups [in case of Experimental Research].

Part 3

Research Design:

1) {Mention what kind of Research (Descriptive/Exploratory/Explanatory/Evaluation) you have chosen & Why?} //Deductive and Inductive approach

2) {Mention what kind of Research technique (e.g. survey, experiment, field Research, case study, document study, Unobtrusive, etc) you have chosen & Why?

3) {Describe/explain your techniques (e.g. sample size, target population, data collection, etc.)

· How we determine the sample size [Magic number 30, large is good, hetro & homo population, not the fraction.]

· Simple random, stratified, systematic, availability, quota, snow-ball, purposive.

Part 4

4)

5)

6)

7) Data collection

· Be careful not to make error in Collecting Data [e.g. level, observation, selection, etc.]

8) Data Analysis (for example) [Make the data set Machine readable]

a) [Code book

b) Data entry

c) Data cleaning]

d) Data Analysis techniques (Elaborate)

For Example:

1) Frequency run

i) Univariate analysis (e.g. mean, media, mode, histogram, charts, range, std, etc)

ii) Bivariate analysis (e.g., correlation)

e) Ethical Issues

f) Budget

g) Time-line (etc.)

9) Conclusion. (Remember it is not a conclusion about your research topic or future outcome but the merit of your proposal).