Research Proposal Guidelines

The purpose of this section is to argue how and in what ways you believe your research will refine, revise, or extend existing knowledge in the subject area under investigation.Depending on the aims and objectives of your study, describe how the anticipated results will impact future scholarly research, theory, practice, forms of interventions, or policymaking.Note that this section is not an essay going over everything you have learned about the topic; instead, you must choose what is relevant to help explain the goals for your study.

Start a new page and use the heading "References" or "Bibliography" centered at the top of the page. Trinity Western University; Writing Academic Proposals: Conferences, Articles, and Books.

Cited works should always use a standard format that follows the writing style advised by the discipline of your course [i.e., education=APA; history=Chicago, etc.] or that is preferred by your professor.

Note that such discussions may have either substantive [a potential new policy], theoretical [a potential new understanding], or methodological [a potential new way of analyzing] significance.

When thinking about the potential implications of your study, ask the following questions:.

Describe the overall research design by building upon and drawing examples from your review of the literature.

Consider not only methods that other researchers have used but methods of data gathering that have not been used but perhaps could be.

Thus, the objective here is to convince the reader that your overall research design and methods of analysis will correctly address the problem and that the methods will provide the means to effectively interpret the potential results.

Your design and methods should be unmistakably tied to the specific aims of your study.

As with writing a regular academic paper, research proposals are generally organized the same way throughout most social science disciplines.

Approach writing this section with the thought that you can’t assume your readers will know as much about the research problem as you do.