Research Proposal Writing: Determining Research Objectives, Questions, and Literature Review

Task 1 – Determining the Research Objectives, Research Questions, and conducting a comprehensive Literature Review (2010-2017)

Propose a research topic in the area of your interest. This would have been done in your Week 1 Discussion Forum. You are to prepare a research proposal outlining the research topic you intend to carry out. Let your lecturer know which topic you would like to research on but remember they will be allocated on a first-come basis and no two students will be allowed to do a research on the same topic.

The topic selected must be relevant to industry, yet academically viable in terms of scholarly research. The focal area for the selection of topic is broad, but, needs to address specific work place problems, issues, challenges, or phenomenon. These examples might provide you some guidance eg: Consumer Buying Behaviour (Marketing); Organisation design (Management); Strategic Management related theories and concepts (Strategic Management); Personality or Perception or Attitude based studies (Human Resources – usually qualitative in nature); Operations Excellence (Operations – usually based on Action Research); Expatriate management (International Business) and many more.

Task 1 – Determining the Research Objectives, Research Questions, and conducting a comprehensive Literature Review (2010-2017)

Provide a Background of the Phenomenon to be studied together with a rationale on why the phenomenon needs to be studied. Establish your research objectives and research questions to support your study. The phenomenon to be studied needs to be supported by relevant and appropriate literature, hence, it is advisable that a thorough literature review is conducted prior to the preparation of this Assignment.

The background, rationale of study, research objectives, research questions, scope of study, research limitation, significance of the study, and the overall organisation of the chapters are to be placed in Chapter 1 of this Assignment.

You should note that such reviews are crucial to the success of a research project since it enables you to prepare your mind and gain a good understanding of the area under investigation, allowing you to focus more clearly on your research question. It is important that your review is well argued and coherent with a strong theme running throughout it. In addition, it is expected that you will use appropriate citations and use the literature that you find in a scholarly manner. Non-credibly sources or sites or citations will not be accepted in the Assignment.

Do not be tempted to just paraphrase what you find, adding citations at the end – that is not scholarly and is not acceptable at this level. You should remember that the review is yours and so it is necessary to review and evaluate all the resources that you have found and then make it clear why you have included the resources and discussed it in your review.

Task 2 – Research Methodology or Design

Formulate and state clearly the research objectives, research questions, and in

Chapter 2, your research framework/ conceptual framework/ theoretical framework/ action research flow/ paradigm of your study together with the appropriate hypotheses/ assumptions/ propositions/ posits based on your chosen topic area. For your chosen research question, perform a detailed analysis of the topic by looking at possible viewpoints and issues and write a concise justification for spending time on that question. You have to be clear whether you are setting out to describe, understand, investigate, explain, predict or prove something, eg. The phenomenon or an observation or an issue or problem or challenge.  

Therefore, the main thing you are doing here is: finding the ‘angle’ of your research, specifying the hypothesis (if there is one), clarifying the objectives and finally outlining the required logistics (assembling the resources). What you are trying to do is, narrow down your broad subject area into a feasible research topic. At Master’s level it is strongly recommended that you focus on a very narrow area to describe or explain a phenomenon as the time factor would not allow you to try and “save the world” with a broad area of research.

Task 2 – Research Methodology or Design

In this section you must outline a clear research methodology and expand it into a workable and credible plan (correlation, interview, survey, case study, actiona research, experimentation etc). You should note two things: (1) The Literature Review must not be regarded as part of your research design. (2) All the key elements contained within the research design from nature of study up till the measurement instruments must be included in this chapter (Chapter 3). By this stage you should be clear of what it is you want to uncover so try to work out what data you want to obtain, how you will obtain it reliably and how you will process and present the results.

Task 3 – References and Citation Styles

It is expected that you will read widely for this assignment and in general it is not acceptable to use just web sources, especially the non-credible sites or sources. The other thing you should note is that it is expected that you will use your sources as appropriate in each task not just in the literature review. Harvard referencing is to be used when you cite and reference your work. Note that internet sources where there is no clear author/ date of publication may NOT be used.  

Apart from the above, the 22 citation or referencing rules for scholarly work must also be strictly adhered to, failing which, your grades could be affected.

Please scan your proposal in Turnitin prior to the submission due date. The total percentage in the report should be less than 20% and each individual item in the report should be less than 3%.