Senior Seminar In Geography
Your first assignment is to construct a research proposal. A research proposal is a standard precursor to most research projects, whether it is a thesis, a grant, or research done for a company or business. The purpose of the research proposal is to provide a brief roadmap of the research that lies ahead. It give your reviewers, co-workers, professors or funding source an easily read justification for the research that you would like to do. Writing good, concise research proposals may permit you to investigate the type of questions that most interest you, may earn you money and save everyone involved in research a lot of time and energy.
Assignment
The first step in this assignment is to think of a topic or question that is interesting enough to you to keep you motivated for 15 weeks. Second, perhaps most important you have to figure out whether or not the topic or question is one that can be done in 15 weeks. A good strategy is to look for data once you've found an interesting topic because availability of data may be the most important constraint for researchers.
There are several components to this assignment, each of which is necessary for you to get a passing grade on this assignment.
- You must have a short introduction to your topic. Something that catches the reader's attention is good. You may lead with the circumstance that brought your research question to mind.
- One or more broad research questions. These may be the "big issues" that answer the question "So What?", and eventually lead to the thesis statement or hypothesis.
- A thesis statement or hypothesis.
- A very short literature review, perhaps only one or two mentions of something written by someone else on the subject/topic or method.
- A statement of method
- A data source
- You anticipated results.
See the example below.
Sample Research Proposal
The proposal below represents a hypothetical research proposal for Geography 490. Plain text represents what a student might write, parenthetical bold text represents commentary that your instructor might consider as he or she examines the research proposal.
Frank Deford, the well known sports authority recently lamented Americans' ignorance of the world of sport that exists outside the United States. He noted that we know little of accomplishments of international superstars such as Brazilian soccer player Ronaldo or German Formula 1 driver Michael Schumaker, while they are household names in much of the rest of the world.(catchy introduction to subject). At the same time, the popularity of hyper-American sports such as football and stock car racing have grown, while the popularity of increasingly internationalized American sports, such as baseball and open wheel racing has fallen. Are Americans really that insular? Do we really look only inward for entertainment? Are we that detached from the popular culture and ideas of the rest of the world? (research questions) To begin to answer those questions, we might look at the world of sports. Studies of sport and geography are somewhat common, including several edited volumes by Carney (1979, 1986) and Bale (1995). There was even a short-lived journal, Sports Place. Many other cultural commentators have noted the American propensity for insularity in popular culture (McDonald 1988) and politics (Smith 1995, Jones 2002), even in the face of growing economic interdependence (Chang 2004).It appears that nobody has attempted to measure this alleged disinterest. (short literature review) If indeed American insularity makes us only want to watch fellow Americans on TV and the field of play, then it would stand to reason that among those sports that have increasingly non-American rosters, then TV ratings would fall as internationalization of the roster has increased (hypothesis -somewhat informally stated) . I propose to test the logic of this assertion by examining the statistical relationship between the percent of foreign born players on major league baseball rosters and the TV ratings. If TV ratings for major league baseball have gone down as the percent of international players have gone up, then it may indicate that Americans do only want to see fellow Americans on the field of play. Perhaps the reverse is true (methodology). Data, including player birthplaces and hometowns, will be collected from web sites featuring major league baseball rosters for the years 1970 to 1990. Neilson family television ratings for a subset of Major league games, including the World Series and the All-Star game will be collected from on-line sources and aligned for the specified time period. Simple correlation tests will be applied to the data (data and methods) . It is likely that DeFord is correct and there will be a decline in baseball ratings as the rosters have increasingly become international (anticipated results). Discussion of the results and the implications for America in the rapidly shrinking world cultural-economy will be discussed.
