I’m working on a literature project and need support to help me study.

Methodological Design (I)

Now that you have completed the “Literature Review” section of your research proposal, we are now ready to move on to the “Methodological Design” part of the final paper. It is an exciting stage not only because it is the last step of the course structure, but also is the stage where the fruits of your creativity and the knowledge you have gained translate into your research design. In this Methodological Design section, you will demonstrate your learning of the methodological tools and understanding of the research process by applying it to your own research design. In other words, in this part, the course content covered in the first half of the semester through the reading and writing assignments will be applied to your own research proposal. Furthermore, it is also important to note the connection between the “Literature Review” and “Methodological Design” sections of the research proposal. That is, while the literature review presents your critical evaluation of the past work by other researchers, methodological design presents your own research proposal for a new research, which has its inspirations from the past work, but has also new dimensions and reasons to offer a new research design.

As you can see in the course syllabus as well, I have broken the Methodological Design down into five parts, and here is the assignment below for the first part:

Methodological Design (I):

In this part, please answer the questions below for your own research topic and proposal:

-What is your research topic?

-What is your research question? What exactly is it that you want to investigate in this research?

-What are your hypotheses?

– What are your units of analysis (i.e. who/what is the subjects of this study?)

-What are your main variables and their attributes? How will you define and measure them?

-How do you relate those variables to each other? That is, in your opinion, what kind of cause and effect relationships exist among the variables? What is/are the dependent variable(s)? What is/are the independent variable(s)? What type of positive or negative correlation(s) do you identify among the variables?