Preliminary Methodological Plan
Instructions: Based upon what you learned about your research topic from doing work on your annotated bibliography and about research methodology, you will write a short methodological plan for a hypothetical research project (note that you are not going to actually complete the research project, but just a plan for one).
Here are the step-by-step instructions to complete this assignment…
1) You will write at least one paragraph that contains the following information (the more information/context that you provide the better):
1a) Come up with a research question for your hypothetical research project. It can be anything that you want to learn. For example, if your topic was police/community relationships, your research question could be: Are police community relations among college students and campus police better (more positive) than those of a sheriff’s department and the general community?
1b) After you come up with a topic/question, explain who the sample of your project would be. For example, if using the same topic from the last example, your sample could be students at UNCP and also residents of the surrounding area.
1c) Explain your sampling strategy. In other words, how would you get people to participate in your study? Continuing with the example above, to get the UNCP students you could get a list of classes and randomly select a certain number to visit and ask people to participate while also randomly picking phone numbers out of the Pembroke-area phonebook and calling residents to ask them to participate.
2) You will write at least one more additional paragraph that contains the following information (the more information/context that you provide, the better):
2a) Explain the research methods that you would use to collect your data. Would you create a survey? Conduct interviews? Do a content analysis of records? Anything else? Continuing with the example above, to measure police/community relationships, you could create a survey to give to your sample of project participants. Or, you could interview students, community members, and police offices and ask them questions related to your topic. Or, you could conduct a content analysis on all of the records of complaints filed about the police in the past few years. Essentially, you could take your topics in many different ways.
2b) Provide more detail about the specifics of your research method plan. For instance, if you were going to conduct a survey, what types of questions would you ask? Using the same example as before, if you were using a survey, you could ask participants how confident they are in the police, how friendly their interactions with police officers have been, etc.
Example of What Your Submission Should Look Like:
_____________________
[your name]
Social Research
Spring 2024
Preliminary Methodological Plan
[insert at least one paragraph containing your responses to items 1a,1b, and 1c above]
[insert at least one paragraph containing your responses to items 2a and 2b above]
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