ATS3255: Developing professional skills
- Subject Code :
ATS3255
Assessment : Research Proposal
In this activity, you will develop a research proposal to present a plan for the research that you intend to conduct. The proposal must detail how and why your research is important and fills a gap in the research on your topic. The purpose of this task is for you to gain experience working through and writing a proposal to study a criminal-justice-related problem. We will not actually conduct the study, just propose to conduct the study.
For the proposal, you will select a topic; review the research literature on the topic; establish research questions; describe the method and plan for data collection, and discuss the potential policy implications. These skills are essential for work in criminal justice agencies and beyond.
Suggested research proposal structure
- Introduction: introduce your topic, state what the gap in the literature/evidence is, and state your research question/s. Do you have any hypotheses?
- Literature review: what is already known about the topic? Here you should discuss the important previous studies and their findings. Towards the end of this section, you should write about what remains unknown about the topic. Where are the gaps? How is your research going to fill this gap?
- Research design and methods (approx 500 words): Here, you need to discuss your research plan. What type of research are you going to do? Are you collecting original data or using secondary data that already exists? How will you be collecting the data? What is the population that you will be studying? What are your variables? How will you analyse them?
- Suppositions and implications: It's hard to know what your impact and findings will be until the research is done, but you can explain the importance of the work and how your work will contribute. What practical findings will your work have for existing theories and assumptions? How will your work help policy and practice? How can your findings be implemented to improve the current situation?
- Conclusion: Like an essay, you need to summarise your proposal and reinforce the purpose of your work.
