Methods Section of a Proposal

Like the previous assignments, you will be building towards the final project, which is a research proposal. In this assignment, you will be working on the methods section of your proposal. You have not yet encountered all the different methods available to social scientists, but you do have a sense of when to use quantitative methods and when to use qualitative methods. You also have some introduction to surveys/questionnaires, interviewing, and in this week, field work. Answer the following questions thoroughly. Although you do not need to include references or any texts for this assignment, you may want to think about what texts you have encountered in this course so far that will help you think through the methods section of your proposal. (For the final project, you will need to use texts from the syllabus to support your decisions for your methods).

1. Based on the feedback I gave on your first assignment, what is your research question now? (10 points)
2. What method(s) will best help answer your research question? Why? (20 points)
3. How do you plan on executing your research? In other words, how will you collect your data? Think through every step needed in order to actually conduct your research. For example, if you are using surveys, you will need to think about what topics you will cover, how you will ask those questions, what format your survey will be in, your population of interest, how you will sample, how you will disburse your survey, how you will make sure your survey results/sample are representative, how you will get your survey into the hands of your sample respondents, etc. What ethical considerations do you need to make? Think granular. Walk me through every step and every hurdle. (50 points)
4. What potential hurdles may come up, and how will you address them? What critiques of your methods may come up, and how will you address them? (20 points)