The purpose of this assessment is to enable students to develop an effective research plan considering context, research questions, sources, timeline, and larger implications for writing a formal research report; Also to practice working with the Research Proposal as an academic genre and to provide an opportunity for working on stylistics and effective academic discourse.
The research proposal will form a foundation for the final research report. It provides a detailed description of the proposed research project, and is like an outline of the entire research project.
- What object (people, places or things) does it suggest you need to study?
- What kind of study does the question suggest (empirical--e.g., ethnography, case study, descriptive study, experimental; historical--oral or archival or both; theoretical; discourse or textual analysis, etc.)?
- What data do you need to collect? (artifacts, texts, people doing something, interviews, etc.)
- How will you analyse the data? (qualitative? quantitative? hermeneutics? discourse analysis? historical? etc.)
- Be very specific in both the data you will examine and the ways in which you will analyse it.
- Look for scholarship that is similar to the kind you wish to design to see what other researchers have identified as data and how they studied these.