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hypothesis. Gray (2004: p68-75) discusses good and bad questions and the difference between a question and a hypothesis. Kerlinger (1986) suggests that a good question expresses a relationship between variables, is unambiguous, and ends in a “?” Gray (2004) adds to this by classifying questions into 4 main types, namely:

• Descriptive – what is happening?
how common is drug use among university students?
• Normative – what is happening compared to what should happen?
how serious is drug use among university students?
• Correlation – what is the relationship, and the strength of this relationship between variable x and variable y?
what is the relationship between gender, academic performance and university drug use?
• Impact – what impact does a change in X have on Y?
has a drug awareness programme had any effect on the level of drug use among university students?

By contrast, a hypothesis is a ‘conjectural statement of the relationship between 2 or more variables’ (Kerlinger 1986), but add to this the fact that these variables should also be able to be measured. Gray (2004) gives an example of a research question being ‘Why is street crime more common in inner city areas?, but if this were written as a hypothesis (to be proved or disproved) an example would be ‘high levels of street crime in inner city areas is a product of liberal policing policies’.

3. Objectives

Objectives are one of the more difficult parts in developing a proposal for your research partly because you need to know exactly what you want to research in order to write robust objectives, and partly because the textbooks talk about objectives differently. Gray (2004 p 73) refers to the writing of objectives as ‘quite challenging’ and he refers to them as ‘operational definitions’ rather than as objectives.

Essentially objectives are statements of intended outcomes from the research, not written as questions or hypotheses but written as statements. So in effect they are written as though you have completed the research and are looking back on what you did in order to meet the aim of the research. Another way of looking at objectives is to think about what it is you need to demonstrate an understanding of in order to meet the aim of the research. An aim / question / hypothesis would typically have about 5 or 6 objectives to support it. The objectives needs to be SMART – specific (and focused), measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely (fit within the timescale for the research). 

4. Justification

In this section of the Research Proposal you need to justify why there is a need for the research.

5. Review of the literature

This is undertaken in two stages by firstly searching for and finding relevant literature, and secondly by analysing / reviewing what you have found.

There is also two elements to literature, namely the literature dealing with the focus of the research (based on the aim), and the literature on research strategy and techniques, and data analysis methods.

According to Hart (2001) the challenge to undertaking a successful literature search is to:
• Plan – understanding the ways in which information is organised and made available;
• Maintain records;
• Extract information from useful sources, including the main arguments, theories, concepts 本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。