Paper, Order, or Assignment Requirements

SOC 150 Research Proposal Assignment
This assignment will take you through the first four steps of the research process as outlined on pages 46-47 of Croteau & Hoynes’s text, Experience Sociology. For this assignment, you will design either a survey research study or an experimental study but will not collect or analyze data. Use the instructions and questions listed below in the Pre-Writing section to guide your thinking and your preparation of the report. Follow the guidelines provided in the Writing section to write your report. Note that you must complete and submit the appropriate IRB form and Informed Consent form with your project. Please add the forms into the end of the electronic file you will submit. Use the “insert page break” and the copy/paste functions to include the forms at the end of your proposal.
Pre-Writing
1. Research Topic
a. Choose a topic and summarize recent research on it.
a.i. Find a discussion of a topic in the textbook that interests you. What sociological questions are raised about your topic? What factors are identified as relevant to explaining your topic? What research findings are presented? What limitations are discussed about the existing research knowledge?
a.ii. Find two recent, scholarly articles on your topic from the Library’s online database. What sociological questions have these articles asked about your topic? What data, if any, do they present? What answers or conclusions do they offer? What questions have not been addressed in the articles? Are there problems with the research or analysis presented in the articles?
b. Identify a specific research question and formulate your hypothesis.
b.i. Given what you read about your topic (step a), what variables can you identify? What pattern/relationship between the variables would you like to explain? What sociological factor(s) do you think might cause or influence any patterns you see in the data? Why do you think this factor might have such an effect? What sociological theory or concept does your question draw upon?
b.ii. Can you narrow your question to a specific relationship between variables that you could examine with survey or experimental data? Would the data you collect allow you to determine if your hypothesis is incorrect? Can you specify the findings you would expect if your hypothesis is correct?
b.iii. Are there variables that may affect the relationship between your independent and dependent variables? Are there any ways to control for these effects?
2. Study Design
a. Identify the type of study you would design to test your hypothesis.
a.i. Are the data you want to collect best collected from a survey or an experiment? (Archival and ethnographic methods are not appropriate for this assignment.) How would you set up your study?
b. Identify and operationalize your independent and dependent variables.
b.i. What is your independent variable? What is your dependent variable?
b.ii. How, specifically, will you define and measure each variable? What questions of validity and reliability do you need to consider?
c. Discuss how you would select an appropriate sample for your study.
c.i. What is the target population you want to describe?
c.ii. What procedure would you use to select your sample? Will your sample be representative of a larger population? How will sampling issues affect the conclusions you draw from your study?
d. Consider ethical issues related to your research, fill out the IRB form, and write/modify Informed Consent form.
d.i. Will your research put human subjects at risk of physical, emotional, social, or economic harm? How will you obtain informed consent from your subjects? How will you ensure the privacy of your subjects?
d.ii. Is Form 1 or Form 2 from the IRB Guidelines appropriate for your study? What changes would you need to make to the Consent Form template to make it appropriate for your study?
3. Data Analysis
a. Discuss how you would analyze your data.
a.i. If you carried out this study, how would you analyze your data to determine whether your hypothesis is correct? That is, what data would you compare to see if your independent variable had an effect on your dependent variable?
a.ii. What results would you expect to find if your hypothesis is correct? What results would you expect to find if your hypothesis is incorrect?
Writing
Format your paper in the following way:
TITLE PAGE*
Running head: APA Style Running Head of Title
See: <https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/>
Title: Full title centered in upper half of the page
Name: Your name centered just below the title
Course: Course name and section number centered just below your name
Date: The date you submit the paper should be centered just below your course number
*Note: the title page is part of the paper. It should not be a separate file. You can use the “insert page break” function of Word to start a new page for the body of your proposal.
BODY OF PROPOSAL
Your title should be centered, boldface, upper and lower case, at top of a new page.
Add a blank line between the title and the introduction.
“Introduction” should be left-aligned, boldface, upper and lower case, below title, as your first section heading.
This section should:
Identify your topic and present what your textbook indicates previous sociological research has found about the topic.
Connect the topic to and explain any relevant sociological concepts/theories.
Explain how the topic was addressed in the articles you found. Be sure to cite your sources, including the textbook, according to the APA style. See: <https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/02/>.
Identify any biases or limitations of how your sources dealt with the topic.
Explain what sociological question you think needs to be answered, given the above discussion.
Present a specific hypothesis that your research would test.

“Study Design” should be left-aligned, boldface, upper and lower case, as your next section heading.

This section should:

Discuss the method you would use to collect data to test your hypothesis, including why this is an appropriate method and whether there are any limitations/concerns about this method of gathering data.
Identify and operationalize your independent and dependent variables.
Explain how you would select an appropriate sample for your study and discuss whether or to what extent you can generalize the findings of your study to a larger population.
Discuss ethical issues related to your proposed study.*
*Note you must submit a completed IRB form and Informed Consent form along with your proposal.
“Data Analysis” should be left-aligned, boldface, upper and lower case, as your next section heading.

This section should:
Discuss how you would analyze your data, if you actually collected it.
Explain specifically what results would indicate that your hypothesis was supported and what results would indicate that your hypothesis was incorrect.

REFERENCES*
“References” should be centered at the top of a new page.

This section should present your reference in APA format.
See < https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/05/>.

*Note: The References page is part of the paper. It should not be a separate file.
Use standard margins and a standard 11 or 12 point font for this report. Text should be double spaced.