Research proposals

Dr. Yanchar's thoughts about research proposals:

1. He is not opposed to white papers or internal reports, but the purpose of this class is an introduction to scholarly writing. White papers are typically not journal articles. The project for the class is scholarly, so white papers may have to be written twice (once for your employer and one for class).
2. Take part in a scholarly conversation.
3. Take the assignment seriously, but know you won't be an expert or even close after taking this class.
4. Relevance needs to be addressed in the final paper. Why should the reader care?
5. Research needs to be original.
6. Watch out for horse-race research (pitting two methods against each other). One curriculum in one class and another in another class, which one wins. These are flawed.
7. Use numbers to make sense of the phenomenon, not to determine causal relationships.
8. Make sure you can get data in a short time and for this class you need to use statistics and interprete them and make inferences.