This assignment will make up 25% of your total grade. It is designed to encourage you to think about the entire research process from coming up with a question of interest to you and other researchers, determining an appropriate research method, relating that question to existing literature and researchers, thinking about where it will be published and presented, and what it will lead to next. Although many research proposals that you will write throughout your career will not require you to put the answers to these questions in writing, it is good practice to think about the entire research process as outlined in this assignment. Your job talks and grant proposals will be much stronger if you have thought through the issues that this assignment will force you to make explicit.

The research proposal will need to address the following questions (although not necessarily in the order presented):

1. What is the problem or issue? (in the theoretical debate, the world)
2. Why is it important? (to researchers, to the world)
3. What have others done and why isn’t it enough?
4. What is your general approach and why is it original and promising?
5. What are you going to do explicitly?
6. What will happen if you get results?
7. What does this mean? (in terms of answering the original problem)
8. Who cares? (which research communities, individuals, organizations…)
9. Where will you publish these results? Why?
10. What broader research agenda does the project fit into? In other words, if you continue further research in this area what will you be doing over the next 5 years?

There is no length requirement, but it is expected that the proposal will take at least 8 single spaced pages. The formatting style and organization of the paper is left to the student, as long as it is consistent and clear.

Although this assignment is not done until the end of the semester, it is highly recommended that you select an area of interest early on in the semester so that our in class discussions will help to inform your final proposal. You may want to create a wiki site for your proposal where you include brief answers to the ten questions outlined above, so that other students can comment on them.

The Research Proposal will be due on April 20th and should be submitted via email as a .doc file to shakmatt@umich.edu.