Assignment 2: Cyber Research Proposal

Within INTL 647 you are required to design a line of research around an assessment of specific cyber issue. In this case, you can select the issue that you identified in your Cyber White Paper assignment (Assignment #1).

You are encouraged to refer to Belcher, Wendy Laura. 2009. "Editing Your Sentences" In Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. A Guide to Academic Publishing Success. Sage. This resource has an excellent step-by-step process for enhancing your writing.

The goal of this assignment is to present a clear research proposal. Your research proposal should be between 5-6 pages in length not including your preliminary source list and references.

You will need to:

1) Identify a cyber incident or an international situation that contains significant cyber issue. Assess and provide some contextual information that helps demonstrate your understanding of the nature of the issue or case.

2) Clearly state your research question.

3) Explain why this issue is important to investigate. What can we learn from this situation? How will the knowledge we gain through your research help our understanding of cognition, information processing errors and/or decision-making errors?

4) Discuss your theoretical framework. Here you will summarize/synthesize some of the theories/models and concepts you'll use to investigate the intelligence/decision-making failures such as consistency theory, balance theory, bolstering, groupthink and etc.

5) Discuss your research design. Your research design should discuss how you plan to carry out your analysis.

Heath and Tynan have a short but insightful article on "Crafting a Research Proposal," which can be accessed

6) Identify a list of 8 preliminary sources, 6 of which must be from peer-reviewed journals. These should be listed using Turabian References style formatting.

Format. Your proposal should include a title page, proposal body, reference page, and a preliminary source list (title, references page, and source list are not included within the page count). Your paper should have 1-inch border on all four sides, use Times New Roman-12 point font, be double spaced, and not have an extra space in between paragraphs. All references and citations are in Chicago Turabian format.

This information is from the Master's Capstone Manual and it should help you develop your research proposal. Students taking the capstone option are required to submit a 5 page research proposal prior to moving forward on their research. These are some of the sections they are required to include within their proposal, they have been included in these instructions as they directly relate to the goals of this assignment.

Introduction. Identifies your specific research question and sets the general context for the study.

• Statement of the problem and context leading to a clear statement of the specific research question.

• Background and contextual material justifying why we should study this case or topic.

• Purpose statement.

Theoretical Framework. The theoretical framework section develops the theories or models to be used in the study and shows how you have developed testable research hypotheses.

• Introduction discussing gaps in the literature, how this study will help fill some of those gaps, and justification for theory or model to be used in study.

• Summary of the theory or model to be used in the study, including a diagram of the model if appropriate.

• Statement of hypotheses to be tested.

Research Design. Describes how you will test the hypothesis and carry out your analysis. It describes the data you will use to test your hypothesis, how you will operationalize and collect data on your variables, and the analytic methods that you will use, noting potential biases and limitations to your research approach. It should include.

• Identification and operationalization (measurement) of variables.

• Sampling plan (i.e., study population and sampling procedures, if appropriate).

• Justification of case studies used.

• Data Collection/Sources (secondary literature, archives, interviews, surveys, etc.).

• Summary of analysis procedures (pattern-matching, etc.).

• Limitations of study and bias discussion.

Preliminary Source List. List of at least eight sources you plan to utilize within your paper, six of which must be from the peer reviewed literature.

Reference List. Reference the works that you have cited (direct quotes or paraphrases) in the text. This must be in the school's prescribed format. [In INTL this means Turabian format, either using the author-date method or the bibliography-notes method]