A step by step approach to write a research proposal
Let's write a research proposal. We will need to:
- Critically read literature in order to identify gaps in the knowledge base that we will need to address in our research
- Learn to summarise existing research based on our critical reading and searching for relevant information
- Take account of "facts" and build theory from the facts: the theory will then lead to generation of hypotheses that we will test
- Based on our hypotheses, we will "design" a study (in our case, we will design an "epidemiological study")
- We will need to plan how many people shall we include in our study, how much of a difference shall we consider meaningful, and how we shall go about collecting the data
Hence, this tutorial will consist of six sections. In this tutorial, we will consider the following question as a "prototype" to go through all the six steps I described above. Once you familiarise yourself with these steps, you can develop your own research questions and see how these different steps will fit with your own question (we will leave this as an exercise for you to conduct after reading this manual). Here is the research question we will investigate here:
What is the relationship between happiness and heart disease? Are happier people less likely to die from heart disease?
There is no real reason why this particular question was selected for this exercise. You can argue that this topic has already been explored in the past, but here we can review the relevant literature and see if we can devise a study that can address some aspect of the knowledge base that has not been touched.