components of a legal research proposal

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Chapter 14: The Research Proposal

14.3 Components of a Research Proposal

Krathwohl (2005) suggests and describes a variety of components to include in a research proposal. The following sections – Introductions, Background and significance, Literature Review; Research design and methods, Preliminary suppositions and implications; and Conclusion present these components in a suggested template for you to follow in the preparation of your research proposal.

Introduction

The introduction sets the tone for what follows in your research proposal – treat it as the initial pitch of your idea. After reading the introduction your reader should:

• understand what it is you want to do;
• have a sense of your passion for the topic; and
• be excited about the study’s possible outcomes.

As you begin writing your research proposal, it is helpful to think of the introduction as a narrative of what it is you want to do, written in one to three paragraphs. Within those one to three paragraphs, it is important to briefly answer the following questions:

• What is the central research problem?
• How is the topic of your research proposal related to the problem?
• What methods will you utilize to analyze the research problem?
• Why is it important to undertake this research? What is the significance of your proposed research? Why are the outcomes of your proposed research important? Whom are they important?

Note : You may be asked by your instructor to include an abstract with your research proposal. In such cases, an abstract should provide an overview of what it is you plan to study, your main research question, a brief explanation of your methods to answer the research question, and your expected findings. All of this information must be carefully crafted in 150 to 250 words. A word of advice is to save the writing of your abstract until the very end of your research proposal preparation. If you are asked to provide an abstract, you should include 5 to 7 key words that are of most relevance to your study. List these in order of relevance.

Background and Significance

The purpose of this section is to explain the context of your proposal and to describe, in detail, why it is important to undertake this research. Assume that the person or people who will read your research proposal know nothing or very little about the research problem. While you do not need to include all knowledge you have learned about your topic in this section, it is important to ensure that you include the most relevant material that will help to explain the goals of your research.

While there are no hard and fast rules, you should attempt to address some or all of the following key points:

• State the research problem and provide a more thorough explanation about the purpose of the study than what you stated in the introduction.
• Present the rationale for the proposed research study. Clearly indicate why this research is worth doing. Answer the “so what?” question.
• Describe the major issues or problems to be addressed by your research. Do not forget to explain how and in what ways your proposed research builds upon previous related research.
• Explain how you plan to go about conducting your research.
• Clearly identify the key or most relevant sources of research you intend to use and explain how they will contribute to your analysis of the topic.
• Set the boundaries of your proposed research, in order to provide a clear focus. Where appropriate, state not only what you will study, but what will be excluded from your study.
• Provide clear definitions of key concepts and terms. Since key concepts and terms often have numerous definitions, make sure you state which definition you will be utilizing in your research.

Literature Review

This key component of the research proposal is the most time-consuming aspect in the preparation of your research proposal. As described in Chapter 5 , the literature review provides the background to your study and demonstrates the significance of the proposed research. Specifically, it is a review and synthesis of prior research that is related to the problem you are setting forth to investigate. Essentially, your goal in the literature review is to place your research study within the larger whole of what has been studied in the past, while demonstrating to your reader that your work is original, innovative, and adds to the larger whole.

As the literature review is information dense, it is essential that this section be intelligently structured to enable your reader to grasp the key arguments underpinning your study. However, this can be easier to state and harder to do, simply due to the fact there is usually a plethora of related research to sift through. Consequently, a good strategy for writing the literature review is to break the literature into conceptual categories or themes, rather than attempting to describe various groups of literature you reviewed. Chapter 5   describes a variety of methods to help you organize the themes.

Here are some suggestions on how to approach the writing of your literature review:

• Think about what questions other researchers have asked, what methods they used, what they found, and what they recommended based upon their findings.
• Do not be afraid to challenge previous related research findings and/or conclusions.
• Assess what you believe to be missing from previous research and explain how your research fills in this gap and/or extends previous research.

It is important to note that a significant challenge related to undertaking a literature review is knowing when to stop. As such, it is important to know when you have uncovered the key conceptual categories underlying your research topic. Generally, when you start to see repetition in the conclusions or recommendations, you can have confidence that you have covered all of the significant conceptual categories in your literature review. However, it is also important to acknowledge that researchers often find themselves returning to the literature as they collect and analyze their data. For example, an unexpected finding may develop as you collect and/or analyze the data; in this case, it is important to take the time to step back and review the literature again, to ensure that no other researchers have found a similar finding. This may include looking to research outside your field.

This situation occurred with one of this textbook’s authors’ research related to community resilience. During the interviews, the researchers heard many participants discuss individual resilience factors and how they believed these individual factors helped make the community more resilient, overall. Sheppard and Williams (2016) had not discovered these individual factors in their original literature review on community and environmental resilience. However, when they returned to the literature to search for individual resilience factors, they discovered a small body of literature in the child and youth psychology field. Consequently, Sheppard and Williams had to go back and add a new section to their literature review on individual resilience factors. Interestingly, their research appeared to be the first research to link individual resilience factors with community resilience factors.

Research design and methods

The objective of this section of the research proposal is to convince the reader that your overall research design and methods of analysis will enable you to solve the research problem you have identified and also enable you to accurately and effectively interpret the results of your research. Consequently, it is critical that the research design and methods section is well-written, clear, and logically organized. This demonstrates to your reader that you know what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. Overall, you want to leave your reader feeling confident that you have what it takes to get this research study completed in a timely fashion.

Essentially, this section of the research proposal should be clearly tied to the specific objectives of your study; however, it is also important to draw upon and include examples from the literature review that relate to your design and intended methods. In other words, you must clearly demonstrate how your study utilizes and builds upon past studies, as it relates to the research design and intended methods. For example, what methods have been used by other researchers in similar studies?

While it is important to consider the methods that other researchers have employed, it is equally, if not more, important to consider what methods have not been but could be employed. Remember, the methods section is not simply a list of tasks to be undertaken. It is also an argument as to why and how the tasks you have outlined will help you investigate the research problem and answer your research question(s).

Tips for writing the research design and methods section

Specify the methodological approaches you intend to employ to obtain information and the techniques you will use to analyze the data.

Specify the research operations you will undertake and the way you will interpret the results of those operations in relation to the research problem.

Go beyond stating what you hope to achieve through the methods you have chosen. State how you will actually implement the methods (i.e., coding interview text, running regression analysis, etc.).

Anticipate and acknowledge any potential barriers you may encounter when undertaking your research, and describe how you will address these barriers.

Explain where you believe you will find challenges related to data collection, including access to participants and information.

Preliminary Suppositions and Implications

The purpose of this section is to argue how you anticipate that your research will refine, revise, or extend existing knowledge in the area of your study. Depending upon the aims and objectives of your study, you should also discuss how your anticipated findings may impact future research. For example, is it possible that your research may lead to a new policy, theoretical understanding, or method for analyzing data? How might your study influence future studies? What might your study mean for future practitioners working in the field? Who or what might benefit from your study? How might your study contribute to social, economic or environmental issues? While it is important to think about and discuss possibilities such as these, it is equally important to be realistic in stating your anticipated findings. In other words, you do not want to delve into idle speculation. Rather, the purpose here is to reflect upon gaps in the current body of literature and to describe how you anticipate your research will begin to fill in some or all of those gaps.

The conclusion reiterates the importance and significance of your research proposal, and provides a brief summary of the entire proposed study. Essentially, this section should only be one or two paragraphs in length. Here is a potential outline for your conclusion:

Discuss why the study should be done. Specifically discuss how you expect your study will advance existing knowledge and how your study is unique.

Explain the specific purpose of the study and the research questions that the study will answer.

Explain why the research design and methods chosen for this study are appropriate, and why other designs and methods were not chosen.

State the potential implications you expect to emerge from your proposed study,

Provide a sense of how your study fits within the broader scholarship currently in existence, related to the research problem.

Citations and References

As with any scholarly research paper, you must cite the sources you used in composing your research proposal. In a research proposal, this can take two forms: a reference list or a bibliography. A reference list lists the literature you referenced in the body of your research proposal. All references in the reference list must appear in the body of the research proposal. Remember, it is not acceptable to say “as cited in …” As a researcher you must always go to the original source and check it for yourself. Many errors are made in referencing, even by top researchers, and so it is important not to perpetuate an error made by someone else. While this can be time consuming, it is the proper way to undertake a literature review.

In contrast, a bibliography , is a list of everything you used or cited in your research proposal, with additional citations to any key sources relevant to understanding the research problem. In other words, sources cited in your bibliography may not necessarily appear in the body of your research proposal. Make sure you check with your instructor to see which of the two you are expected to produce.

Overall, your list of citations should be a testament to the fact that you have done a sufficient level of preliminary research to ensure that your project will complement, but not duplicate, previous research efforts. For social sciences, the reference list or bibliography should be prepared in American Psychological Association (APA) referencing format. Usually, the reference list (or bibliography) is not included in the word count of the research proposal. Again, make sure you check with your instructor to confirm.

Research Methods for the Social Sciences: An Introduction Copyright © 2020 by Valerie Sheppard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Law: Proposal and Dissertation Writing

Structure of the proposal.

• Conventions of Scholarship
• Dissertation Writing
• Getting started
• Generate Research Ideas
• Brainstorming
• Scanning Material
• Suitability Analysis
• Difference between a topic and a research question
• Literature Review
• Referencing

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A proposal should proceed along the following steps:

(1) a clear problem statement is formulated;

(2) the significance of the problem is explained;

(3) a clear research question is formulated;

(4) an answer or solution to the problem is suggested;

(5) the originality of the answer or solution is indicated through a literature survey;

(6) the way in the which the argument will be substantiated in the bulk of the dissertation is outlined;

(7) the method used (and its suitability) to answer or solve the problem is explained;

(8) any definitional issues are clarified; and

(9) a bibliography of materials used is supplied.

• Step 1: Problem Statement
• Step 2: Significance of the Problem/Issue
• Step 3: Research Question
• Step 4: Argument/Answer
• Step 5: Originality of Argument(Literature Survey)
• Step 6: Substantiating the Argument (Chapter Outline)
• Step 7: Methodology
• Step 8: Defining Concepts (Optional)
• Step 9: Bibliography

A proposal commences with a clear problem statement.

• What is the problem that intrigues you?
• What is the issue that you want to deal with?
• What is the question that you want to answer?
• It is often useful to state in your first paragraph as clearly and succinctly as possible what is the problem that you are addressing. Once that is done, the problem is unpacked.
• What is the background to the problem?
• What are the logical building blocks in law and practice that lead to the problem?

These building blocks are very important because they are again reflected in the chapters, where argument is substantiated. Vital to a successful dissertation is a narrowly defined problem. As a research paper is confined to 18 000 words, the issue must be much more limited than that for a mini-dissertation (30 000), full thesis (50 000) or a doctoral dissertation (100 000).

As you will be spending a considerable amount of time on the dissertation, you have to justify this endeavour to yourself, your supervisor and your examiners. Moreover, if the problem is significant, the solution or answer to the problem will be equally important. The significance of the problem may lie in a number of areas. In the case of divergent judgments on an issue, the conflict creates confusion and conflict in practice. The importance could lie in poor service delivery because of badly designed governance structures. Overall, the aim is to state the importance of the research that you will be doing.

Given the problem outlined and having shown its significance, a research question must be formulated that it captures the problem statement. What is the issue or problem that you want to answer? This is a short, concise statement that hones the problem statement into one or more questions.

Very important is that this research question must have a legal focus. It is the legal question you want to answer. Although sub-questions may include issues of development, etc., the main focus must be on some form of law/regulation,etc.

This should also be a measurable question. Indicating your research question as "Examining the effectiveness of insider trading legislation" is not feasible. How will you measure the effectiveness of this legislation?

Having done the reading of the relevant materials you have by now developed a tentative argument or an answer to the problem. You need to state upfront how you will be addressing the problem, what will be the answer or solution. This argument is what binds the dissertation together – providing the central measuring rod in deciding whether any material is relevant or not.

When you start off the proposal writing, you will have some idea of what the answer / argument will be. However, as you develop and substantiate the argument in the various chapters through your thorough engagement with the materials, you may find that the argument is refined, adapted, or changed. This is totally acceptable and even expected. Therefore, while the proposal signals the commencement of the dissertation (and is chapter 1 of the dissertation), it may also be last piece that you write in order to reflect the refinement and reshaping of the argument that occurred along the way.

The criterion by which you will be measured is whether your dissertation has added or contributed to knowledge on the topic. What is the point of the dissertation if the problem has already been solved or the issue addressed?

You must demonstrate the originality of the argument by showing how it compares with the existing literature on the issue. This is done by reading extensively around the issue to determine what other authors have written. In some cases, when you have described the literature on the topic (who wrote and what did they say – not a listing of article or book titles!), you may conclude that no one has yet addressed the particular issue, and therefore, you will provide a unique contribution. Even if you find that the issue has been addressed, you may conclude that it was wrongly or inadequately done. You may argue, for example, that the academic interpretation of a line of court judgments was wrong. The academic enterprise is about challenging accepted views and doctrines.

The focus in the literature survey is on “literature”, namely what other scholars have written. This is not the place to describe the Constitution, legislation or court cases.

The main purpose of the literature survey is to:

(A) Indicate what has been written on the subject and

(B) What will your contribution be? ie, What has not been covered by the literature? How will you contribute?

The bulk of the dissertation is devoted to substantiating the argument. This is done through breaking down your argument into its basic components and devoting a chapter to each component. In the proposal the chapters are outlined, showing how each form part of the argument and contributes to the answer or solution. This is not done by just providing chapter headings. You have to indicate whatthe purpose is of each chapter and what will be argued in that chapter. The emphasis falls on the logical flow of the argument and how each chapter contributes to that flow.

This should be done by way of a brief paragraph description of what will be covered in each proposed chapter.

Having outlined how the argument will be substantiated in the various chapters, you have to show how you will go about this task. What are the materials that you will rely on? What is the methodology that you will follow? If you are analysing court judgments, your primary source of information are case reports. A further primary source of information is legislation, official documents, policies, notices, etc. A secondary source is what other authors have written about the same cases or legislation in the relevant field. As all these materials are found in a library or the internet you may refer to it as a desktop study.

You may want to use empirical data in substantiating your argument. There are a variety ways of collecting such data. Official sources may be used. Newspapers may also be referred to. You may even venture out and collect your own data by, for example, conducting interviews, or inspecting court records. In the case of interviews you need ethical clearance from the University’s Senate Research Committee.

If you are going to do a comparative research, you must explain why, indicate your comparators (comparative countries, etc.) and you must explain why you are using these specific comparators.

In the context of your proposal (and later in chapter 1 of the dissertation), it may be necessary to define some key concepts that will be used in the chapters. This is done to provide the necessary clarity when confusion and ambiguity may be present.

All the materials referred to in the proposal must be listed alphabetically in the bibliography. Use the following main headings:

• Laws, regulation and other legal instruments
• Other government publications: policies, reports, etc.
• Books, chapters in books, articles, reports, internet sources
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