UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

Faculty of Humanities

GUIDELINES FOR THE PREPARATION OF A RESEARCH PROPOSAL

This document is intended to assist Masters and PhD students in preparing their research
proposals. A research proposal is a plan of action; it sets out the aims of your research project and
how you intend to achieve these aims. It is usually the case that as research students embark on
their projects, their research questions and plans undergo some adjustment. However, the
advantage of a good research proposal is that it provides a focus for your research activity and a
benchmark against which you can make whatever adjustments become necessary.

The proposal for a Master’s thesis is usually between 5 and 10 typed pages; that for a Doctoral
thesis, between 10 and 15 pages.

For Masters students embarking on a mini-dissertation, all that is required by the Faculty of
Humanities is the title of your project, and the name of your supervisor. In the case of students
who are intending to register for a Masters degree by dissertation only, the Faculty allows for a
period of provisional registration, during which time you are able to work with a supervisor in
putting together your research proposal. Your proposal must be submitted to the Faculty office
within six months of first registration.

All students, whether registered for mini or full dissertations, will be allocated a supervisor who will
guide them through the various stages of producing the project. You can expect your supervisor to
meet with you on average every two weeks. In the initial stages of your project, this might be more
often. If you wish to have work read and commented on, this should be submitted at least a week
in advance of your tutorial appointment.

The following headings are intended to assist you in writing a proposal. You may find that in writing
your proposal, you want to use different headings, and order your account differently. This is
perfectly in order, as long as the basic issues set out here are covered.

1. TITLE
As indicated above, the title of your thesis will be registered, so the title needs to be brief and
descriptive. It should provide a fairly clear idea of what your thesis is about.

2. FOCAL RESEARCH QUESTION/PROBLEM

A thesis or dissertation is the investigation of a problem. This research problem or question
provides the focus for the entire project. What is it that you wish to investigate? Can you specify
crisply the question (or problem) that your thesis sets out to address? You should aim to state a
single research question, which you may then choose to flesh out through a number of sub-
questions. Bear in mind that a dissertation (Ph.D, Masters, mini or full) should be a well-contained,
tightly-focused and coherent piece of work that examines an issue in some depth.

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3. RATIONALE
Having identified the question or problem you wish to address through your research project, you
need to say something about how/why this question has arisen. For some students, the research
project emerges out of a theoretical interest, for others it emerges out of issues of practice.
Whatever the case, you should signal briefly why you have chosen the question that you have, and
what contribution you think the completed research project might make to our understanding of the
field.

4. LITERATURE REVIEW
When you have registered your proposal and got into the swing of the research project, you will
need to undertake a thorough review of the literature pertaining to your research question. For the
purposes of the research proposal, you need to have read sufficiently in the field to justify your
research question (Why is it important? Have other academics taken up this question in the same
or similar ways? How do current debates in your own field of study bear on your research
question? Your literature review must assist you in addressing these issues. It will provide
information on how your own, or related, research questions have been investigated by other
academics in your own (and other, related) fields. It will also provide you with resources to build
your own conceptual framework. The literature review thus has two broad aims, to familiarise you
with both the theoretical and empirical work which can inform your study.

5. CONCEPTUAL OR THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

For many students, their research question emerges from theoretical debates in their field, and
they draw from these in order to undertake their own projects. The key concepts are drawn from
relevant theory which then needs to be discussed in the thesis itself, with key ideas defined
closely. For the purposes of the proposal, it is necessary to discuss very briefly what theoretical
ideas will be drawn on, and attempt to define key concepts as tightly as possible.

Not all studies foreground an explicit theoretical base to the same degree. Some emphasise a
broader empirical engagement. In this case, there remains the need for an analytic framework to
be developed, which defines key concepts, demonstrates how these link together and identifies the
variables that will be selected as indicators of these concepts (i.e. how these concepts are to be
recognised in the data).

6. RESEARCH DESIGN
Masters and PhD research studies invariably involve some kind of empirical work. This means that
the researcher enters a field to collect data, the analysis of which will allow the research question
to be addressed. Such a field may comprise part of an archive of, say, historical and/or policy
documents. bIn either case, a number of crucial decisions need to be made about conducting this
empirical work:

Sampling: Where will you collect data from? If you are doing archival research of an historical
nature, over what time period will your study extend? What documents will form part of your data?
Which will you leave out? On what basis will you make this decision? A range of important
decisions need to be made, about how to make the project meaningful, but at the same time
manageable in terms of the time frame and resources available.

Data collection instruments: Developing a research design means making decisions about who (or
what, in the case of textually-based studies) to approach for the purposes of data collection. It also
means making decisions about what data to collect. These decisions need to be constantly
referred back to your research question: what kind of data do you need in order to address it?
Collected how? Different kinds of instruments are available; will you use (maybe adapt) some
instrument presently in use, or develop your own?

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7. ANALYSIS OF DATA
The analysis of your data will form the spine of your final research report, the focus around which
all other aspects of the thesis will turn. For the purposes of your proposal, you should, if you can,
specify how you intend to analyse your data. If you are using statistical tests, then you should
specify which you will use and why. If you are analysing qualitative data, such as interview
transcripts, you should provide some indication of how you intend to proceed in analysing these.

8. RESEARCH ETHICS
If you are doing a documentary analysis - the ethical concerns might be straightforward and
minimal but if your research involves work with human subjects, the ethical concerns might be
quite complex. Either way, you should refer to the UCT Code of Ethics for Research as a guide.
THIS IS ON THE UCT WEB-SITE AT THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS: http://www.uct.ac.za

9. TIME LINE
Try and develop a plan of work for the completion of your thesis, so that you set aside time for
conducting a literature review and developing your research design, conducting fieldwork,
analysing data and writing up the report. This will assist you in pacing your progress through the
thesis, and also in planning a manageable project. Fieldwork that lasts six months may be
appropriate for a PhD student, but is probably not such a good idea for a student attempting to
finish a mini-dissertation in one year!

10. SAMPLE BIBLIOGRAPHY

The last part of your research proposal should contain a sample bibliography. This provides a
guide to reading you have already done, or plan to do, in developing your research project. Put
down the key theoretical and methodological texts you have drawn on, or intend to draw on, as
well as that literature, both theoretical and empirical, which bears on your own study. The sample
bibliography should not be longer than a page.

At every step along the way in planning your research project, you should ask yourself if all the
elements link together in a coherent and rigorous way. Is the literature review relevant to the
research question? Is your research design an appropriate way to address this question? A good
thesis is coherent, well-focused and well-written, and achieving this is something you need to strive
for from the very start of your project.

FRAMING YOUR RESEARCH QUESTION

Framing a clear research question is a crucial part of developing your research proposal, and
should be seen as emerging from a dialogue between a developing theoretical position and
decisions you need to take about research design and subsequent data analysis.

THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL ANTECEDENTS

RESEARCH QUESTION

RESEARCH DESIGN
(What, when, where, how, with/from whom)

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The following criteria are intended as a GUIDE to assist you in framing your research question, and
enabling you to assist your peers in developing their own.

1. Does the research question provide a clear idea of what the research project is about/hopes to
address?

2. Is the question one that can be addressed by research?

3. Is the question researchable?

4. Is it possible to deduce from the research question:

a) possible "answers" or modes of addressing the question?
b) feasible fieldwork, in terms of sampling and data collection?

5. A researchable question will provide some indication of how the research design is likely to
unfold. If you think about the fieldwork component of the project (that is, your data collection)
can this be contained comfortably within a two-month period? This is not a hard and fast rule,
but a guide. Masters students expecting to complete their projects in a year need to be very
clear about their fieldwork and what length of time this will take. A time period in excess of two
months for fieldwork is likely to cause problems.

6. Is the question interesting, relevant and important? Is it important that it should be so?

7. Is there a single question? You should aim for a single research question, developed through
sub-questions, rather than generate a collection of questions, although this is not always
possible.

8. A good research question, although it is addressed through a fairly small-scale empirical study,
is drawn from more general theoretical and methodological issues. Does the research
question emerge from and point only at a local context, or does it emerge from a broader set
of disciplinary or professional issues?

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