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Deadline 26/11/2022 - 04/12/2022.

Research Proposal Guidance
Overview
The Proposal will provide a brief outline of the rationale, focus, research questions, and selection of
methodology and methods for the Dissertation.
Title
The title of the project should accurately reflect the nature of the proposed research. However, this
is a working title which may need to change later on. The title should be under 15 words in total.
Aims/questions
List the main aims of the research as bullet points. These signal your intent in doing the research.
Aims should be few, 3 or 4 at most – a greater number suggests that you are proposing more than
can be done in just one project. Make sure the aims are tightly focused, and cover the main aspects
of the research. For example, one aim might be to map or scope the current situation in your
research field. Another might be to deepen understanding of particular experiences or practices in
your field. A third might be to inform others (e.g. policymakers, practitioners, students, parents etc.)
about this. A fourth might be to apply a particular theory to understand your topic. It is always
useful to have a theoretical aim, as this indicates the masters potential of your research The aims
given here are suggestions for possible types of aims, not a prescription.
Avoid using verbs like ‘to explore’, ‘to examine’, ‘to investigate’ in your aims – these are broad
processes, not specific intents. It is better to use verbs such as ‘to map’, ‘to identify’, ‘to determine’,
‘to inform’ etc.
Also avoid aims such as ‘to deepen understanding of non-traditional students’ experiences’, which
are vague - students have many different experiences in their lives! Specify which particular
experiences you are trying to understand, e.g. ‘non-traditional students’ experiences of teaching and
learning in higher education’, or ‘non-traditional students’ experiences of balancing higher
education with the demands of family life’.
Research questions should be as precise as possible given the anticipated methodology – e.g.
ethnographic research will usually have considerably more open aims and objectives which will
evolve as the researcher engages over time with the field, whilst other approaches may demand very
specific research questions or even hypotheses.
Background and purpose
Begin the main body of the proposal with a paragraph that gives a clear and succinct statement of
the background and purpose of the research. It should highlight an area/problem of importance to
the field, briefly outline its context.
Reviewing the literature to make the case for your research
In this section you will make the case for the study: review key empirical findings and theoretical
positions and debates already established in the literature (this will need to be developed throughout
the project, but the most important authors and texts should be reflected at this stage). Identify both
what is already known, and how your research fits with what is already known. Your aim is to
outline the main ideas that have shaped your proposal and to show that you have an understanding
of similar work and how it relates to your proposal. Show you understand conceptual/theoretical
differences in the literature, and define key concepts being used. This section should be written so
as to justify the proposed study: it therefore has to be succinct and very focused. A strong personal
interest in a particular issue may be necessary, but on its own it is not sufficient justification for
carrying out research. This section needs to be argued in a coherent manner, and supported by
citations to the literature. You may find it helpful to structure this section around a small number of
themes (eg historical perspectives, key debates, theoretical perspective, policy context etc).
Methodology
Explain the methodology chosen and why it appears the most appropriate one to generate the data
that will provide answers to the research questions/meet the research aims. Denscombe (2017)
outlines seven strategies, which may be a useful overview from which to select ONE that will be
appropriate for your research design.
Methods (research design)
Outline the specific methods which you intend to use (again, this may have to shift as the research
progresses, and is not ‘written in stone’). This must be justified, again with reference to the research
questions/objectives. It must also be appropriate to the overall methodology. The design should be
as explicit as possible, recognising that in some approaches the methods cannot be as pre-defined as
in others. But provide as much detail as you can about what you intend to do, and where methods
cannot be pre-defined, show what you intend to do to in order to define them at a later stage. It is
very helpful to cross-reference each different element of the research design to the relevant
numbered research questions/objectives to show that you have chosen methods appropriate to
answering the m.
The design should be clearly feasible for the scale of project with the limited time and other
resources available to the you. This means that, for example, a proposal for a study based on
interviews should state clearly how many interviews you aim to do, and how long they will be. The
key is that the proposal should enable you to get sufficient data that is appropriate to answer the
research questions. So the quality of the data, its richness and depth is generally going to be more
helpful than lots of very bland predictable and repetitive data. So 8 one-off interviews of 30 minutes
may be appropriate for an institutional case study. Just one or more participants may be enough for
a narrative life history project with several interviews of up to 2 hours each. You might also be
using mixed methods with questionnaires for breadth and interviews for depth and here fewer
interviews would be needed. It is often helpful to think of naturally occurring data that is collected
as part of your work role (e.g students’ work, assessment data, minutes of meeting, classroom
observation etc)
You will also need to cover issues like sampling, instruments (will you use questionnaires,
structured/semi-structured/unstructured interviews and/or observations, concept mapping etc. etc.),
data collection method (face-to-face, telephone, focus groups etc), access, transcription.
Consider the limitations of your methods and how you will plan to minimise these for example
questionnaires have generally a low return rate and give superficial data, how can these problems be
avoided? How can the subjectivities associated with action research be acknowledged and the
validity of the approach strengthened? Convey an in depth understanding of how you will be able to
justify the quality of your data gathering through wider reading about methodology and methods.
Project plan
A useful end point is to show the planning and timescale of the project e.g. in a Gantt chart or table
or excel file. This should address the different stages of the project, from start to submission, and
show an awareness that some stages are on-going or repeated and will overlap with others. Again,
realistic project management and feasibility need to be shown here.
Writing the proposal and references
The proposal should be written in clear and correct English, and in an academic style. Make sure
you support your arguments and avoid plagiarism by citing other authors, and include a full list of
references for all of your citations at the end. References must be given using APA 7th format.
Length of proposal
A word length is 2000 (the list of references should not be included in this word count). Part of the
discipline of the research proposal is to hone the piece very tightly and clearly, and avoid ‘waffle’.
Format and submission process
The submission will be uploaded to Brightspace as a SINGLE file in any format (eg MS Word,
WordPerfect, PostScript, PDF, HTML, RTF, OpenOffice (ODT) and plain text formats).
And finally…
Your proposal is a ‘springboard’ for your project, and needs to give you a clear and manageable
sense of what you are setting out to do. Be aware, though, that a researcher often needs to introduce
creative change as their research develops: the proposal should not be seen as ‘written in stone’ for
the duration. Research questions may need to be adjusted, new issues may arise.