After you complete each of the five Research Exercises, you can expect to begin

After you complete each of the five Research Exercises, you can expect to begin working on your Final Research Proposal.
The research proposal is the culminating creative project of the course. The final proposal may most efficiently be completing by drawing directly from work completed for the Research Exercises. Your Research Journal may also provide opportunity to explore elements of the Research Proposal long before the due date.
The SSU Library will be an important resource at most stages of your project development, and the SSU Writing Center can help you polish your writing. Office Hours with the instructor, and collaborative work with peers, will also help you succeed. I expect you to consult Edwards (2015) to prepare your written assignments, especially your final research proposal.
Your research proposal should be roughly 4-6 double-spaced pages (no more than 7), inclusive of references. Be thoughtful and concise in your language.
The Research Proposal must include the following sections, each with a heading:
Introduction
The introduction should introduce the topic, the intellectual and practical/social problem(s) your research is intended to address, the method your study proposes, and a brief note regarding the data you propose to collect. The introduction should be concise and persuasive (no more than two brief paragraphs). It should be written for an audience of courteous but skeptical reviewers who may (or may not) be interested in funding and supporting your project.
Research Question
Although your research question may also appear at the end of your Literature Review, I ask that for this proposal that you formally separate out your research question. In this section, only the research question(s) should appear. They do not need to be framed with any other text or information.
Literature Review
I encourage you to substantially review your Literature Review submitted earlier in the term. It will be evaluated in the context of the final proposal. Therefore, even if you were successful (from a grading perspective) on your initial Literature Review, be mindful of how you situate your Literature Review in the context of your research question, choice of method, and your proposal as a whole. At minimum, I expect that you have incorporated two additional peer-reviewed research articles. For added resources, you do not need to provide annotated bibliography entries.
Methodology
The methodology section must do the following:
Identify the research method the study will employ. Multiple methods are discouraged.
Reason about the method: why is this method best suited for answering the research question as posed? What are the general strengths of the method you have chosen, and how might those strengths work to the advantage of your project? Likewise, what are some of the general limitations of the method you have chosen—and how might your study succeed in spite of these limitations? I encourage you to ground your choice of method in literature, ideas, concepts, or theories addressed in your Conceptualization assignment and your Literature Review section. When addressing methods that other researchers have used to study your topic, you may compare and/or contrast your methodological with theirs.
The methodology section must also indicate what kind of data your study proposes to collect. Although this discussion need not be exhaustive, it should be concrete. If you are proposing an ethnography, a field site should be identified. If you are proposing an interview-based project, the target population of research participants should be clearly stated, as well as the scope of the project. If proposing a survey-based project, it should be clear if you are proposing to create a new survey or else use existing data sources. In either case, it should be clear what the data will look like (what themes or survey items it contains), and where/from whom this data is collected.
Significance Statement
The significance statement relates your proposed project to several audiences that your work is designed to inform. The nature of that audience is your choice, but it should be a concrete one. “Policymakers”, “sociologists”, “businesses”, and “the public” are not clear audiences. Instead, focus on groups that would actually likely benefit from the answers or insights your research could generate. Without making grandiose claims, make bold claims: research really matters, and can have broader impact on society. It is your job in this final section to clearly indicate how it could matter, and to whom.
(for this assignment all of the research is completed. The goal is to bring all the work together and present it all as one.)