Steps for Writing a Research Proposal

Literature Review

You can use the following transitional paragraph to announce the plan of your research proposal:

“In other to achieve the above declined objectives, we will critically review the literature in section 2, followed by a presentation of our adopted methodology in section 3. Ethical considerations and procedures will be discussed in section 4, the time scale for our work will be provided in section 5, while section 6 will describe the needed resources and finally section 7 will list the references used in the project.”   

Literature Review

As discussed in class a complete review of the past literature on your topic.

• Start with broad area of interest if research problem is not known and narrow down
• Focused around the research problem
  • What is already known in the area?
  • What is not known or what are the gaps in the existing body of knowledge?
  • What questions have remained unanswered?
  • Are there any areas of professional conflict?
  • What theories have been put forward relevant to the area of research?
  • What suggestions have been made for further research?
  • What research strategies have been employed by others undertaking similar research?

Methodology

• Research Design

The research design refers to the overall strategy that you choose to integrate the different components of the study in a coherent and logical way, thereby, ensuring you will effectively address the research problem; it constitutes the blueprint for the collection, measurement, and analysis of data. Note that your research problem determines the type of design you can use, not the other way around.  You can choose from list below depending on the objectives of your study:

•    Action Research Design
•    Case Study Design
•    Causal Design
•    Cohort Design
•    Cross-Sectional Design
•    Descriptive Design
•    Experimental Design
•    Exploratory Design
•    Historical Design
•    Longitudinal Design
•    Observational Design
•    Philosophical Design
•    Sequential Design

• Data collection procedure

Should provide detailed information about the following aspects of the study:

• Who will constitute the study population?
• How will the study population be identified?
• Will a sample or the whole population be selected?
• If a sample is selected, how will it be contacted?
• How will consent be sought?
• What method of data collection will be used and why?
• In the case of a questionnaire, where will the responses be returned?
• How should respondents contact you if they have queries?

All choices here should be justified and supported by literature, which you reviewed in the previous section 2.

• The Theoretical / Conceptual Framework

Guided by the reviewed literature, which should inform you what variables are needed, and how they are conceptually related to each other. As an example, see the framework in figure (1) below, which is derived from the universal theory of technology acceptance:

The above conceptual framework was prepared for a research project on:

“The impact of perceived value and trust regarding AI Based Digital Educational Platforms on students’ purchase intensions in higher education institutions”

• Data Analysis

Describe what you will do with the collected data in order to meet your research objective.

This may typically include:

• Descriptive statistics, (univariate and Bivariate), (quantitative and qualitative variables)
• Correlation and chi-square tests
• Regression modelling (for prediction or prescription)

Ethical considerations and procedures

Describe how:

• you will get research participants consents (absence of coercion)
• you will ensure anonymity of research participants
• you will ensure confidentiality of any and all sensitive information collected from study participants
• your covering letter will ensure all of the above

Timescale (please see Gantt chart)

Clearly present how long each required task for the completion of the research project might take. This can be achieved using the Gantt chart (example seen below)

Resources

Describe all the resources that will be needed to carry out the research project successfully. This include both non-financial and financial resources to cover the costs of anything needed for the project:

• Data access
• Required equipment, software, external expertise etc…