Getting Focused and Tying Everything Together

by

Charles T. Diebold, PhD

March 2007

Congratulations on completing the prospectus! Approval of the prospectus means that you have described a potentially viable research project. The prospectus, though, is merely a “concept” paper, and approval does not mean you have specific enough focus to begin writing the proposal.

The set of questions below are to help you get focused, and to help you tie everything together (everything must be logically tied together). These do not cover new ground, but they do demand much more specificity and linkage than in the prospectus. Once I approve your response to these questions, you will be ready for a Phase II literature review and to start writing the proposal in earnest.In the meantime, expect that your responses to these questions will go through several drafts. In part, this will be because you haven’t been specific enough, and, in part, because becoming specific on one item may change what is needed for another item. As well, responses may change as a result of delving deeper and deeper into the literature in order to be specific (i.e., you may learn something that changes the focus or specificity). In short, this is an “iterative” process (this is very important!—look up the word if you don’t know what it means).

In concert with answering this set of questions, you should be conducting a Phase I systematic literature review (see the tutorial “SearchingTheLiterature_A_Systematic_Approach.pdf”) and systematically organizing what you read (see the How To Keep Your Research Organized link in the Resources area of the classroom).

  1. What is your problem statement?(Remember, this is not that poverty, or torture, or racism, or whatever is a problem in the world; rather, it is a summary statement of what we know about a phenomenon of interest and, most importantly, what we don’t know that is worth knowing that your proposed research will find out—it is the so-called “gap” in the literature. It is also important to understand that what “you” don’t know is not the same as what “we” don’t know. Your first task is to learn what “we”, the scholarly community, know by studying the literature. Although this is listed as the first item, the problem statement may be the last item you’re able to specifically complete.)
  1. What specific theory or theories will guide your research? How, specifically, is the theory or theories relevant to the problem statement?(Note: this is not a contest to see how many classic theories you can associate with your phenomenon of interest. The theories/frameworks must be important for one to understand the phenomenon and to interpret/explain one’s results—e.g., in a classic scenario you have an IV and a DV; the IV is expected to have an effect on the DV; the theory/framework needs to address, in part, why this might be so; that is, you need to establish via theory/framework why the IV would have an effect on the DV.)
  1. What, specifically, is your research question or questions?
  1. How, specifically, is the research question or questions relevant to (a) the problem statement, and (b) the theory or theories guiding the research?
  1. What, specifically, are your study variables? How, specifically, will each study variable be measured?
  1. How, specifically, are your study variables related to (a) the problem statement, (b) the theory or theories guiding your research, and (c) your research question or questions?
  1. What, specifically, is your sample (i.e., who will be your participants)?
  1. How, specifically, is your sample relevant to (a) the problem statement, (b) the theory or theories guiding your research, (c) your research question or questions, and (d) each study variable?
  1. What specific bodies of literature are you reviewing?
  1. How, specifically, does each body of literature relate to your (a) problem statement, (b) theory or theories guiding the research, (c) research question(s), (d) study variables, and/or (e) sample?