Assessment Task: Research Proposal

Goal: The Research Proposal is fundamental to ensuring any research conducted is relevant, timely and cost effective. This Task will allow you to develop a full research proposal incorporating all stages of the research process.

Assessment Criteria:

Demonstration of sound presentation and communication skills in presenting a professional written report

• Presentation
• Referencing
• Communication (spelling/grammar/expression)

Apply relevant research theories and frameworks to develop applied research proposals

Introduction and background:

• Introduction (around ½ page max)
• clearly state your purpose and outline the format of your proposal.
• Background to the research problem (around 200 words)
• briefly present the circumstances that have lead to the immediate problem
• why it is worthy of investigation - expected benefits
• boundaries, or delimitations of scope.
• Make sure you incorporate any feedback from Task 1

Problem definition (around 100 words):

• clearly states the management problem, research question and the research objectives/issues
• management decision should be in question form and should focus on the management decision to be made
• research question should be in question form and should focus on the management issue to be resolved
• research objectives/issues are more detailed information that will allow you to answer your research question (make sure any terms used are defined and measurable).
• Make sure you incorporate feedback from Task 1

Literature review (around 700 words):

• overviews the current state of knowledge
• relevant academic & practitioner based literature (min of 10 refs including a mix of academic journals and practitioner sources)
• analytical not descriptive.

Research design and method (around 800 - 1200 words):

Remember when proposing this design that you may actually be required to undertake this research in a subsequent course. While a full answer to your research objectives may require multistage research that may not be achievable in terms of time or resources if you are actually doing the project in a study period and you may only be able to undertake the first stage(s) or the total design that may be based solely on desk research or desk research with a small primary data study. So key issues to be addressed in this section include:

• Justification of selected research design (ie exploratory, descriptive, causal or some combination - why is this design appropriate and why are other designs not appropriate)
• Description and justification of appropriate methods
• If your study is a desk study consider what sources of data you need for each objective, where you will source the data from, how valid and reliable are the data, and what analytical techniques or theoretical models will you will apply to the data to address your objectives
• If your study requires primary data consider what method(s) you will use eg interviews, focus groups, surveys etc; what sampling approach will you use? What will your sample size be, how will you actually select respondents?
• If your study combines desk research with primary data you will need to address all the points above.

Additional issues:

• Demonstrate understanding of ethical issues in research
• Limitations of the research
• Proposed time schedule
• Approximate Budget.