Research proposals generally begin with an introductory section that describes the research problem and establishes its significance. This section answers the following kinds of questions: What exactly do you want to study? Why is it worth studying?

Writing the Research Grant Proposal
Grant proposals generally require the following elements. Of course, you should always consult your grant guidelines carefully before submitting a specific proposal. You are writing a general proposal for this assignment, and you will not actually collect data.
Problem statement/objective
Research proposals generally begin with an introductory section that describes the research problem and establishes its significance. This section answers the following kinds of questions: What exactly do you want to study? Why is it worth studying? You will want to situate the problem within the context of past research in the topic area. Provide a succinct summary of the extent of research on your topic—is there a study or a groups of studies you want to build from/found relevant? If you cannot find anything on your topic, it is also important to note that the topic has not been well-studied.
Research Question Your specific research question(s) or hypotheses should be stated clearly either at the end of the description of the problem/objective.
Methods This section describes how you will conduct your study. Regardless of the type of research you plan to do, you need to indicate how you will carry out your study so others may judge its viability and strength. This should include your unit of analysis, whether you are doing quantitative or qualitative research, what design you will use, and how you will obtain or collect your data.
Subjects for study Describe the subjects (people or objects, e.g. texts) for your study, considering carefully the type and number you need. Explain your method of selecting your subject(s) (and if a sample, describe the population and how the sample will be drawn).
Measurement Describe the kinds of measures you intend to use and explain why you have selected these (have they been used previously or are you developing your own?). A discussion of measurements generally considers the following questions: What are the key variables in your study? How will you define and measure them? Do your definitions and measurements draw on or differ from those of previous research in this area? (If you are using a writing prompt, or a survey questions, or other such written material, it is usually appropriate to include a copy of this in an appendix at the end.)
Analysis Describe the kind of analysis you plan to conduct, and explain the logic and purpose of your analysis. The kind(s) of analysis you plan will, of course, be contingent on the subjects, the measures and the data collection as well as on your research question. These all work in tandem with one another. Whether you’re conducting a quantitative or qualitative, a study of some combination or a study of some other kind, you need to explain how you will analyze the data you collect. This section typically answers the following kinds of questions: Do you intend to simply describe the what and how of a given phenomenon? Do you intend to examine relationships among variables? or Do you intend to explain why things are the way they are? What possible explanatory variables will your analysis consider and how will you know if you’ve explained the variables adequately? If you plan to use specific statistical procedures (whether descriptive, inferential, or some combination), state these.
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THIS IS NOT A WRITING ASSINGMENT BUT A EDITING FOR A FINAL DRAFT!
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Feedback from my professor on each part-
Problem/Objective: A very important topic, and one definitely worthy of more attention and research. This is a very broad topic, so you will need to think through how you will narrow the scope here to something that you can research and design data collection around. You will eventually develop one research question and one hypothesis. One potential path could be to survey young people about their social media usage and see how it impacts their mental health over a determined set of time. How would you find your survey population of young people? How large would your sample size be? What specific questions would you ask them, and how long would you be studying them? How would you measure the impact of social media on their mental health? Would you look at specific apps, or just one in particular like Snapchat or TikTok? Start to think through these questions as you further develop your topic choice and your research question.

Research Question: Good work this week. Good job of narrowing your scope a little bit and just focusing on Facebook. Start to think through how you would collect your data through the platform, and what your potential sample size will be. Also think through what your research population will be, and how will you ensure a representative demographic sample. What will your hypothesis be? I’m assuming it will revolve around the more time people spend on Facebook, the worse it is for their mental health. How would you go about testing and ultimately proving or disproving this? For your questions, think through your potential answer sets. Do you want to focus on close-ended or open-ended questions? Which approach would give you a richer data set? As you further develop your proposal, continue to think through how the mechanics of your research would work if you were to actually partner with Facebook and get this survey out in to the field for actual data collection and study.

Methods: I’m still curious about what your hypothesis is. What are you seeking to test through your research and data collection? Please make sure you include what your hypothesis is in your next assignment so I can give you feedback on it. For your survey here, what is your research population? All Facebook users? Only users within a certain age range? Are they limited to a specific geographic area? How large will your sample size be? How will you get people to participate in your survey? Will you offer incentives? And how will you ensure a representative demographic sample of the overall population you are studying? Start to think through all of these questions and what specific questions you would ask your participants (and how many), and what your answer sets would be. Would you ask open-ended questions, or close-ended? Which would give you a richer data set? For these assignments, remember that the more detail and specifics you include, the more feedback I can give you.

Subjects for study: For your hypothesis this week, think about how you would test and research this. You would need two sets of data points: users mental health *before* spending time on Facebook, and also after. This would be needed because you are claiming that increased time leads to worse mental health. How would you test and prove this? And because you are testing “Facebook users,” you will need to ensure you have a representative demographic sample of all Facebook users. How would you get these statistics, and adjust your research accordingly? For your survey, how large will your sample size be? What specific questions will you ask participants? I will want to see specific examples of these questions in your final paper. I didn’t see any discussion of potential threats to external and internal validity here. What are some issues that might arise through your research, and how will you control for these factors as you collect your data?

Measurements: Good work this week, although I still have a lot of the same questions about how your research will work in practice, going back to some of the feedback I’ve left you in recent weeks. Make sure you are addressing and answering the questions I provided for you in feedback from previous assignments. For what you have here, remember to cite your sources whenever bringing in outside statistical information. When you are introducing your topic in your final paper, make sure to provide background on not only why you chose this research topic, but also on the specific research population you will be studying. I you to spend more time getting into the specifics of how your research will actually work out in the field, and that involves giving me details and specifics about the specific subset of people that you will be analyzing and studying. The more in-depth information you can provide for me, the better.

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