Writing research proposals
One of the major reasons why applications for
postgraduate research are rejected is that the research proposal is
not strong enough. Writing a research proposal takes time and
should not be rushed. At Hull University Business School we expect
proposals to be approximately 2,500 words in length. You will need
to convince us that the research is worth doing, that you are
competent to carry out the research and that you have given some
thought to the practical issues of data gathering. We will ask a
number of questions of the proposal such as:
- Is the problem/question that you have
identified researchable given the time, resources and data
available?
- How interested in it are you? Students that
submit several different topics in the hope that we might like one,
do not convince us that the student is committed to a particular
research problem.
- Will the results be of interest to
others?
- Does the study fill a gap, replicate, extend
or develop new ideas in the literature?
The proposal should contain the following
elements:
- An introduction which provides an overview of the topic,
identifies the research questions, describes the purpose and the
significance of the research and provides background on the context
for the research; for example, public sector motivation in
Malaysia, banking practices in Egypt or logistics practices in a
region of the UK.
- A discussion of the literature(s). You need to respond to the
question of what literature (s) will provide a background and what
are the key issues or gaps. Clearly you will not be able to submit
a full literature review but at the same time a proposal that only
contains 5 or 6 references will not demonstrate that you are aware
of previous research on your chosen topic.
- Some indication of chosen research methods and data collection.
Again at this stage you will not be able to provide a great deal of
detail about how you will research your questions but you will need
to offer some ideas on whether you will carry out a quantitative or
qualitative study, or a mixture of different methods. You will need
to indicate whether you will use surveys, case studies,
semi-structured interviews etc and whether you will collect primary
data or use secondary data. You will also need to indicate any
practical problems that you can foresee in gathering data.
Your proposal will be seen by several prospective supervisors
who have expertise in your chosen field and you will need to
convince them that your proposal offers exciting research
possibilities and that you have the ability to research it.
Example proposals can be viewed on the research topics page.