Research Proposal Writing: Guidelines and Structure

Note: The Research Proposal will be the foundation of the project research work being undertaken by the student. The Proposal will be written of approx. 3000 words; the distribution of word count for each section is given below against each section title. The research plan timelines and the references will not be included in the word count.

You will write your answers in this given sheet itself.

Provide a concise and clear title of the research project work being undertaken by you.

• Provide a brief introduction to your research topic, giving out the business company/ industry overview, including the issues/ problems prevalent in the organization/ concerned industry/ sector.
• Give out the aim of the research project, objectives and the research questions of your project work.

• Show how your research work fits into the literature available on your subject matter. Also, show how your research objectives/ questions intend to fill in the gaps and/ or extend knowledge after going through the available literature.
• You must refer to at least 10-12 good sources of literature, out of which at least 6-8 or more should be references from recognized academic publications found in peer reviewed articles/ journals.

• Give out your research philosophy, research approaches and the methodology you will follow to conduct the research.
• Give out the methods of collecting your primary data, discuss the population and sampling methods you will use, by justifying the same.
• Discuss ethics, reliability and validity measures you are going to adopt in your research work.

• What resources you will access for collection of your primary and secondary data?
• What arrangements are being made to access primary and secondary data from your chosen organisation/ industry?

• Please provide a plan of stages of your research development and thesis writing, with a time?line of proposed goals for your program.
• Your time-lines should include your plan right from the preparatory stage, to writing the various chapters of the dissertation, to the final write up and submission of the project.
• The time-lines can be put in a tabular form and a Gantt chart made for the same thereafter.

• Please provide references/ bibliography as per the Harvard Referencing System format.
• It must contain good quality references from journals/ articles and other good sources.