This assignment should be between 2000 (minimum) and 2500 (maximum) words in length. NB The word count required for this assignment does NOT include your bibliography & amp;appendix To achieve an excellent grade, you will need to submit a proposal which: is clearly structured, properly referenced and written in an academic style; refers to relevant academic theories, concepts, empirical work or work on research methodology as appropriate; and demonstrates an in-depth understanding of issues around selecting an appropriate research methodology. Template Title Provide a title that describes what you are going to research Research Statement: This should consist of no more than two sentences outlining what the research is going to be about and lead into your specific Research Questions (which are not the same as respondent questions) Rationale and Research Questions: Research is about questions – you need pose a question or a series of questions that investigate an academic problem worthy of research. To establish this you need to provide an academic rationale for the research – a rationale is a justification of why this is a useful / interesting problem. Therefore, this section should:. 1. Outline the rationale for the research 2 . Develop from the rationale at least 1 but no more than 3 research questions worthy of investigation. Literature Review In doing research you include yourself within a community of scholars, each of whom has gone into looking at similar problems, this is then written up by researchers and academics - you need to base your research on their work – almost as ‘proof’ that your research has value. To do this you need to provide a literature review of this past work to show how other researchers have developed their ideas. The literature review will ‘form the foundation on which your research is built’ (Saunders 2003:44). It will ‘evaluate’ past research, it will be ‘critical’. (Saunders 2003:48-49) and will be structured in such a way as to start wide and narrow down to your research problem – thereby linking the literature to the methodology. This section should: 1 Provide a literature review that shows relevance to your research idea 2 Highlights the main theoretical concepts 3 Covers a range of up-to-date sources that 4 Present an argument for the research Please note: Citing just 3 sources from the Internet is not a literature review – you need to look in main texts and journals and these should include a range of sources. Methodology / Methods / Sample. Your methodology should outline the theoretical and practical approach to gathering the data. You need to outline your overall approach and what philosophical stance you will adopt (i.e. positivist or phenomenological) and then say why you have taken this approach in relation to your actual idea. You should also describe the method by which you are going to gather the data – any problems with this method – the channel of gathering the data and this should be explained in relation to research methods texts and you should then say why you are going to use this method in relation to your actual idea. You then need to outline the sampling strategy, who you are going to research, how have they been chosen (e.g. probability / non probability) and how many you intend to research and again this needs to by justified i.e. why in relation to the sample and the idea. The methodology should be broken down into: 1. An overall introduction outlining the philosophical approach 2 . A section on the methods 3 . A section on sampling Technical This section needs to consider any technical / practical problems you might face for e.g. with access or in terms of obtaining sufficient response. This section needs to include: A section on the technical and practical issues Ethical issues It is important that you demonstrate that you understand the ethical issues facing researchers – as a minimum you should indicate that you have read (and therefore reference) at least one ethical code of conduct – you should also cover issues of confidentially and anonymity. Some projects may have an extensive section on ethical issues – it depends on the subject – but all projects need to consider them. Full consideration of the ethical issues – this is covered in the seminar in week 11. Also see Ethical Approval Form in workbook. Please note: you should not attempt to research any subject involving children or vulnerable groups. Research on the National Health Service is also problematic as you need to comply with NHS guidelines for researchers. Referencing You need to fully reference throughout the work – both in text and bibliographic references need to be in the Harvard APA style – work lacking academic sources will be penalised re the University grade criteria. This could mean that your poor referencing fails your work. If in doubt – ask your seminar tutor for further clarification on referencing.