Research plan Assignment
You will be required to submit a written plan for your Project. It may help if you imagine
that you are applying for a grant to fund your project: your plan will then obviously need
to convince readers that you are addressing a clearly defined and important issue, that
you have done the background research, and that the methods you are proposing to use
are likely to be successful.
Maximum overall length: 2000 words.
Your plan should include:
1
The aims of your research project (or the questions it will answer), and a brief
outline of the background context. The aims may cover both practical, and
theoretical outcomes – e.g. you might aim to suggest modifications to a theory to
enhance its value or validity in a particular context. You should also mention the
scope of your aims: do they refer to one organization or to a whole industry, for
example? (Note that the aims should refer to your research project, not to yourself
or your organization.)
2
A brief review of previous research. This should be a review of the main books
and articles relevant to your research (not just a list of articles or a statement of
what you intend to read). Given the word limit for the assignment, this must be
brief, and will obviously need expanding in your final project.
3
A plan of the methods you propose to use to carry out your research. Your plan
should explain how you intend to achieve your research aims, and discuss the
rationale behind your proposed approach. If, for example, you have three research
questions, you should explain the methods you will use to answer each of them.
There are a wide variety of possible methods. Besides surveys based on
questionnaires and interviews, you might want to analyze websites or company
documents of some kind, set up an experiment or a pilot study of an innovation,
run a simulation, and so on. Your plan should be reasonably detailed. It is not, for
example, sufficient just to say you will do a questionnaire survey. If you are doing
a survey you also need to specify the target population(s), what you want to find
out from the survey, your data gathering and sampling strategy, and roughly how
you will analyze the resulting data. It is not necessary to give a general discussion
of ideas such as positivism, social constructivism and phenomenology, unless you
think they are relevant to what you are proposing to do. It is, however, necessary
to explain why you think your proposed methods will produce useful results – you
should, for example, justify the approach to selecting samples, and any key
measures you are proposing to use. It may help to imagine yourself applying for a
grant for your proposed research, and ask yourself if the grant awarders would be
convinced that you have a sensible plan that will deliver, as far as possible, valid
and useful results.
Michael Wood, Portsmouth Business School, 14 September 2011
4
A critical discussion of your proposals. This should include a discussion of any
problems which may lead to the results being wrong, unreliable or inadequate in
some other way, and a consideration of any possible alternatives to your proposed
methods. You should also discuss any ethical difficulties you foresee.
Obviously, to get a good mark you should ensure that you make a good job of 1-4 above.
Your assignment will be marked using the University grade criteria for level M. It is
worth paying particular attention to:
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formulating clear, coherent and appropriate objectives,
demonstrating how your research relates to the literature,
producing a detailed and well argued plan of your methods which clearly meets
all your objectives, and
including a thorough critique which includes a consideration of other possible
methods.
Note that this assignment will not be marked anonymously (because we will have
discussed your specific project in class so we should be able to identify authors): you
should include your name as well as your student number.
You should also submit two further documents with your research plan (these are not
included in the word limit):
1
A draft of the completed ethics form should be attached to the end of your
assignment. (The final form will need to be agreed with your project supervisor,
which will not be possible at this stage.) The ethics form will give you a useful
checklist of some of the things you need to address in your research plan – e.g.
target population, sampling strategy, approach to obtaining informed consent, etc.
2
Fill in the attached form – Information to assist in the allocation of a project
supervisor – and include it in your assignment as the first page (please keep it to a
single sheet).
Michael Wood, Portsmouth Business School, 14 September 2011
Information to assist in the allocation of a project supervisor
Please include this in the front of your proposal assignment when you hand it in. It will
be photocopied, so please fit it all on a single page.
Course:
Name:
Student number:
Email address:
Provisional title of project:
Brief summary (one short paragraph) of aims and proposed methods:
Selected references from your proposal (please include some of the important references
from the reference list in your proposal – don’t include them all if this means using more
than a single sheet):
Any requests about your supervisor (or arrangements already made):
Any other relevant information for allocating a supervisor:
When you know who your supervisor is, you should let him/her have a copy of your
project proposal. It would also be helpful to show him/her the comments made by the
marker of your proposal.
Michael Wood, Portsmouth Business School, 14 September 2011