Research ProposalGuideline (Prof. Zeynep Bulutgil, January 2014, added to by Prof. Karen Jacobsen, October 2016)

Issues for Consideration:

-Who is your audience? Academic vs practitioner

-How thorough to be in proposal – full lit review? May be determined by development of methods (grounded theory)

-The thesis committee and advisors

Proposal Outline:

I. Introduction - Statement of the problem:(incl. importance and significance of problem area) and your related research question(s) together with hypothesized causal relationships.

Concept & Measurement:Explain key constructs (both the cause and effect) in jargon-free language. Provide an abstract definition for the phenomenon that you are seeking to explain and then discuss how you would measure this concept (if the methodological part will include both a statistical and case-study/field research part, you might include the cross-unit measurement here and discuss the case-based operationalization in the part that focuses on the case)

II. Literature review and Theory: What have other people said about your research question? Provide a critical assessment. What is your argument/theory? (Your contribution could be a novel theory or you can test existing theories against each other). Either way, you have to specify the hypotheses and empirical implications that follow from each argument. (Remember that sometimes arguments can be eliminated because they are logically inconsistent even before you use data).

Statement of hypothesis: be specific about what is predicted. Show how hypothesis is linked to problem statement and literature review. The lit review should cover both theory and methods related to your research questions. There are good articles on writing a lit review (Randolph 2009) – use them.

Make sure you use reputable and appropriate sources (not too much online stuff) that are condensed with only relevant information included. Citations are in the correct format (see APA format sheets).

III. Methods – See full discussion below.

IV. Expected Results

  1. Statement of Expected Results:be concise; use Tablesand Figures to present parts of the analysis.

V. Conclusions

Policy Implications of the study:Discuss implications of results; Identify any remaining problems in the study.

Methodological Section: What methods are you going to use to answer your question? And why?

Statistical Methods: Specify the unit of analysis you would use. Describe how you would measure the dependent and independent variables (if you have already indicated how you would measure the dependent variable before, you need not do it here again). Indicate which independent variables test or control for which theory that you have mentioned. Discuss how much of the data is already in existence and how much of it you would need to collect? If you have to collect data, what sources will you use?

Comparative case study/historical method: Which cases will you consider? Why do you choose these cases? What types of sources are you going to use to analyze the cases? Be very clear on which type of findings/expectations would contradict or support which theory. Remember that case studies are especially useful for testing empirical implications that do not directly relate to your dependent variable.

Field Research: Why do you choose to conduct field research in specific areas/countries? What do you intend to do in the field (surveys, field experiments, open-ended interviews, participant observation)? Why do you choose these particular methods? What types of findings from these surveys, interviews or experiments would support or contradict the theories that you mention in the theoretical section?

Archival: Which archives will you use? Why?What type of information do the archives entail? How reliable are they? What do you expect to find (or not) based on the theoriesyou discussed above?

Methodological Section should entail the following:

Regardless of which methods you use you need to address the below issues (there might of course be additional issues that you need to address depending on your research). Discuss the extent to which each constitutes a problem and how you would tackle these problems.

  1. Endogeneity(Ezemenari et al. 1999)
  2. Defined as the problem that arises (in evaluation) when other factors affect the intervention and outcome simultaneously making it difficult to disentangle the pure effect of the intervention; or (in econometrics) as the problem that occurs when an explanatory variable is correlated with the error term.
  3. Endogeneity arise from measurement error, simultaneous causality and omitted variables.
  4. Controlling for alternative explanations/Omitted variable bias/many variables-large N
  5. Bias (selection bias & bias in sources/archives/reporting)
  6. Sampling strategy:
  7. Sampling procedure:How units were selected; which sampling method is used and why. Description of population and sampling frame
  8. Sample description:Describe sample accurately; discuss problems.
  9. External validity considerations:Generalizability from the sample to the sampling frame and population is considered.
    Measurement section:
  1. Measures:Describe outcome measurement constructs and include reference (unless you created the measure). provide the entire measurein an Appendix.
  2. Reliability and validity: address both reliability and validity ofall measures.

Design and Procedures section:

Describe how the study was designed and conducted. sequence of events; include essential features to enable replication

Ezemenari, K., et al. (1999). Impact Evaluation: A Note on Concepts and Methods. Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network The World Bank.

Randolph, J. J. (2009). "A Guide to Writing the Dissertation Literature Review." Practical Assessment, Research and Evaluation14, Number 13.