research proposal example for students

research proposal example for students

Research Proposal Example for Students

1. Introduction

The research proposal should have an introduction. This will explain the problem or issues you will address, investigate, or research. You will need to explain the research issue or problem that you are addressing and give details about why this is an important area for research. You may also need to provide some background or a literature review of the problem or issue. This section should be fairly brief but should provide enough basic information to explain your proposed research and/or dissertation fully. If you are applying for a PhD, you may wish to consider the “Research issue, problem or question” and the “Literature review” sections of this chapter to be pilot studies which may lead to further development of your PhD study or dissertation. These can be used as appendices to your research proposal. It is important that you fully discuss your proposed research with your academic supervisor and identify a clear research question and strategy before starting to write your research proposal.

2. Research Problem

A study on the factors that can lead to the failure of a software development project has never been challenged with the goal of identifying the probability of occurrence of failure at the start of the project. It is much easier identifying how and why a project failed after the fact. Deciding early in a project lifecycle whether or not continued investment is warranted is an important issue facing many organizations today. Software development projects are becoming increasingly expensive and over 80% of a project’s total cost is spent in post-development phases. If there is a high probability of project failure, it may be in an organization’s best interest to cut their losses and allocate resources to more productive projects. Currently, there are no tools or methods to assist project managers in making this go/kill decision. This is a specific problem that IU SEIRI is addressing with their practical research. We have collaborated with two IEEE communities, Computer Society and Software and Systems. These societies are very interested in this research and they are also providing some funding, resources, and a platform for presenting our work at a major conference. We believe this study can provide valuable insight on the issues of project failure. For this reason, we would be happy in weeks 5-6 to talk to you and any other interested parties in the development of an I-PERC tool that would dynamically predict the probability of failure and when to pull the plug on a project’s continuation. At this time, we have little else to report but we are a very open research team and collaboration with knowledgeable people is a driving force for our projects. We would perform our user studies throughout the lifecycle of this project. This includes the study of your decision-making experiences. We now seek and strongly encourage feedback from any individuals having the decision-making authority concerning the allocation of resources to a software development or systems project.

3. Research Objectives

These objectives are clearly interconnected and if any one of them changed, there would be an impact on the others.

Objective 2: Design an information system architecture for the secure transmission of healthcare records.

Objective 1: Identify and document security threats and vulnerabilities to data transmitted wirelessly.

For example, a study aim to “identify and explore security vulnerabilities in wireless data transmission of patient healthcare records and design a robust information system architecture” has the following two objectives:

The objectives should be interconnected, so that if you change one, the others will need to be reviewed and probably changed. This is not a problem, it is part of the process, however, you must be mindful of this when you are writing them. An objective that is not interconnected can create problems later and waste a lot of time.

Your objectives will be precise with a clear indication of the planned direction of the study. They will help you to stay focused on the research question you have and not drift off into a different area.

Time-bound: When will you achieve the objective?

Realistic: Is the objective something that you can achieve?

Achievable: Can the objective be achieved with the resources, time, etc. that you have available?

Measurable: How will you know if you have been successful?

Specific: Exactly what you are going to do.

The objectives of your study should be SMART:

4. Methodology

Remember to focus this section. The student should provide a short background of the problem, what research question is to be answered, and the chosen method. He/she should also provide a justification for the method. A table or flowchart may be a very effective way to show the design.

A research project will fail if the research method is not planned well. Thus, this section must convince the reviewers that the method is sound. Also, the student must show why the chosen method is the best way to answer the research question. This involves showing that the problem has not been adequately answered in the past, the method answers the problem of the study well, and the method is an improvement over other methods that have been tried in the past.

This section is the heart of the proposal and is the primary concern of the technical reviewers. The purpose of this section is to show how the student has designed his/her research and why the design fits the research.

5. Conclusion

The result of the past two and a half decades of rapid economic growth, to which migrant labor has made significant contributions, is that China is more deeply integrated into the world economy. This is often seen as a recent phenomenon, whereas in fact China has had two periods of global integration before, both in the late Imperial and Republican eras. These ended in the early 1950s with the Communist victory. In the early Republican era, China was the labor-intensive workshop of the world market, much like the situation today. The Communist victory was in part due to the rural and urban poor’s deep dissatisfaction with the exploitation and humiliation suffered in that integration. This first era of globalization ended with the Japanese invasion and the onset of World War II. The second era, from the late 80s to 1950s, was one of semi-colonial dependency and Japanese invasion/occupation. The Socialist era that followed has been judged a failure by the recent theorists of globalization, and so we have what Samir Amin calls a restorationist thesis China’s current drive toward integration. Our findings clearly indicate that there are analogies and lessons to be learned from the past. Japan’s pre-war development left a legacy of occupational disease and stunted social development that it is still struggling with today. With such a clear example, it is important to ask whether China’s present path is a good one. Considering that the once revolutionary Japanese Communist Party has recently disbanded itself, it may be of interest to Chinese communists and radicals to reflect on the missed opportunities and tragic fate of their Japanese brethren. Such comparisons may be discomforting for the leaders of the PRC, who have prided themselves on China’s century of national humiliation (1840-1949) finally coming to a close with the rise of the socialist republic.

Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese laborers have left their villages to work in the factories producing goods for the world market. In doing so, they are part of one of the largest migrations in human history. Migrant labor has taken on new proportions in China as a result of the rise of the global economy. We have long understood that poor people may move from one country to another in search of opportunity, but what are the class dynamics of a situation where millions of people move from the countryside to the cities of their own country? We have studied one aspect of this – the construction of the world’s largest industrial labor force and the implications for labor processes.