Prospectus: The Study

Nature of the Study

In the section Nature of the Study, you should describe your study methodology. The reader of this section is expecting to see specifics of how you will conduct your study. If you are using surveys, which one(s) will you use? How many participants are you planning to have? How did you arrive at this number? How will you recruit your participants? The more information you can provide, the better the reader can see you understand the research methods you are proposing to use.

Possible Types and Sources of Information or Data

The section is asking specifically, in your study what data will you use? Some possibilities include: test scores from college students, employee surveys, observations of children, interviews with practitioners, historical documents from state records, de-identified medical records, or information from a federal database.

Inappropriate sources to include in this section are literature you are reading, your committee, and any other data you have not previously addressed in the prospectus. This section should merely be a summary of what you have previously discussed in terms of data.

Finally, state how you plan to analyze your data. If you are doing a quantitative study, indicate the statistical tests you are planning and the dependent, independent, and moderating variables. Will you need post-hoc tests for your analyses? Indicate if post-hoc tests are appropriate (if you do not remember what these are, check out the chapter in this book on quantitative analyses).

If you are doing a qualitative study, how will you analyze the data? Be specific about coding and themes. If you are doing a mixed method study, indicate how you will examine the quantitative and qualitative aspects separately and together.

Overview.

You have written a first draft of your prospectus, congratulations! However, there are still some things to work on. Make sure all parts of your prospectus are consistent, make sure you are using appropriate terminology (e.g., do not use terms like "correlation" when talking about a qualitative study). In quantitative studies, make sure the research questions align with methods/ variables, and your analyses.

Next time, we will consider your prospectus from the faculty perspective. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu