Proposal paper

Research Project Proposal Paper: Due December 4th by 5:00 PM

There are 4 sections of this paper:

Introduction & Literature Review
Methods
Univariate Analysis & Interpretation
Conclusion
Reference List

Introduction (~1 page) & Literature Review (~3 pages)

These are very important parts of any research paper as they truly set the stage for the project. In the introduction, you need to provide a concise description of the topic being explored, your approach in addressing this issue, and answer the “so what?” question, which refers to why a reader should care about your issue. You also need to include a scholarly research question (“What are the correlates of intimate partner cyber aggression among college youth?”). The introduction should be almost 1 page in length and provide a roadmap for the proposal (that is, what should the reader expect to see in subsequent pages?).

The literature review should include literature that is relevant to your research project that helps the reader understand your social issue and frames it in a meaningful way. That is, it sets up your specific research project. When constructing the literature review, I think it is helpful to think of a funnel: you start with an overview of the general literature in the area and then work your way down to a discussion of your paper, highlighting how it fills some unknown gap in the existing literature. You will need to include a minimum of 5 peer-reviewed journal articles published in the last 10 years (2010-2020) for this portion of the project and cite them correctly on a reference list.

Methodology (~3 pages)

Within this section, you will need to state your formal research question and provide at least 3 hypotheses related to this research question. You will need to justify and explain these. You will need to provide information on your proposed data including:

sampling strategy and population;
your dependent, independent, and control variables; These measure descriptions need to include your 3 quantitative measures that you created independently and your 5 qualitative interview questions.
your survey design, including the types of questions and measures you are using as well as how many questions are included in the survey and how long it will take a respondent to complete it
ethical issues that may arise in the course of conducting your research project.

Univariate Analysis & Interpretation (~1 page)

Provide a brief description of your univariate findings from your pilot study (that is, the Qualtrics survey that we did as a class in lab sections). That is, what were the classroom responses to your survey? See exemplar journal articles for information on formatting.

Conclusion (~1-2 pages)

In this section, you will need to link your preliminary findings back to the literature that you covered earlier in the paper. You should conclude with a brief discussion of the limitations of your proposed project and other ideas for future research. You should remind me of the “so what” of your project and discuss the implications of what the wider study might reveal in terms of policy, prevention, and/or intervention programs.

This project should be 8-10 pages in total, excluding your title page and references.

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