Soci–316
Final Presentation and Research Proposal
The Research Proposal
As detailed in the course syllabus, your research proposal must be related to the study of human societies and fall within sociology’s broad intellectual mandate. Your topic does not need to be tethered to the present day or wedded to any specific intersection of time and space—i.e., as long as you are explicit about your analytic choices, you are free to broaden your temporal horizon.
Broadly speaking, your proposal should illustrate your familiarity with the theoretical and methodological frameworks discussed this semester. You are free to propose a qualitative study, a quantitative study, or a mixed-methods project that fruitfully integrates different methodological and epistemological traditions. You do not have to conduct any research this term. That said, you can field a pilot study or summarize the results of exploratory data analyses to help you develop the empirical architecture undergirding your proposed project and motivate your overarching research design.
Expectations for the Final Presentation
As noted in the course syllabus, you must prepare a presentation that provides a high-level overview of your research proposal. Presentations will last \(\approx\) 10-15 minutes. Any presentation that lasts less than 10 minutes or longer than 15 minutes will incur a penalty. To ease interpretation, you should prepare a slide deck that includes—but is not necessarily limited to—the following items:
A title slide that summarizes your project and provides a succinct, high-level answer to the question: “what is your presentation about?”
A slide (or set of slides) that clearly presents the research question(s) guiding your project.
A literature review that situates your work within a broader body of sociological scholarship. Here, you should concisely review the extant literature1 and point to potential “gaps” or lacunae that your project will address.2
1 What arguments are already out there?
2 How will the current study augment what’s already out there?
- A data and methods slide (or set of slides) that describes how you plan to subject your propositions to scrutiny—here, you should provide brief answers to the following questions3:
3 If you have data from a pilot study, you may include a results slide—say, by embedding some preliminary data visualizations, tables, summary statistics, or interview excerpts.
- What is your target population—or who are your research participants?
- What are your units of analysis?
- What is your sampling strategy? Alternatively, what are the existing data sources—e.g., public opinion datasets, text corpora and so on—that you plan to draw on?
- What are the key concepts, variables or measures animating your analysis? How will these concepts be operationally defined?
- How will you analyze your data (thematic coding, machine learning etc.)?
- A conclusion slide that distills key takeaways from the presentation and answers the question: “what should the audience remember about my findings and my broader topic of interest?”
Beyond following the structure detailed above, you will be evaluated on:
Your delivery—that is, the clarity and concision of your script; the deployment of effective transitions between slides; and how well you manage time.
Your command of the presentation material—that is, your familiarity with \(x\), your phenomenon of analytic interest, as well as the data and methods undergirding your proposed analyses.
The design of your deck—that is, whether you avoid clutter on slides; use effective headlines and titles; and ensure that your slides are easy to read and visually engaging. For more hints, see this.
Expectations for the Research Proposal
Introduction (1-2 Pages)
In your introduction, you must discuss the research question underlying your proposed project with lucidity and precision. Your introductory paragraphs must provide a brief summary of the literature you are in conversation with and offer a clear roadmap for the exposition to follow: i.e., what is the central question, puzzle, problem, or idea that your research will address? What are the key claims being made or hypotheses being tested? How will different theoretical perspectives, conceptual models and empirical instruments be deployed to advance your arguments? Answering these questions is vital.
Literature Review (6-8 Pages)
In your second section, you should provide a more detailed overview or exegesis of the existing literature. How have other scholars studied \(x\), your phenomenon of interest? What conclusions have they drawn? What are the evidentiary bases for these conclusions or claims? Identify some of the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments pervading the extant literature. Are there any “gaps” worth filling?
For some projects, it may be appropriate to include a Background section of 2-3 pages, either nested within or preceding the literature review. This is particularly useful for projects that engage with specific historical conjunctures, policy frameworks, or settings (institutional, sociocultural, etc.) that readers may not know a priori.
Provisional Argument (1 Page)
After reviewing the extant literature, you will provide a well-developed argument that builds on existing insights while charting a relatively novel path forward.4 After all, if \(x\) has been empirically “solved,” it is not worth researching further. In furnishing your argument, you should clearly articulate what you expect to find and how this finding may be sociologically interesting. To this end, you may sketch formal hypotheses or provide a detailed discussion of your core expectations.
4 You can think of this argument as the central thesis guiding your inquiry.
Methodology (6-10 Pages)
Once your argument is established, you must carefully explain how you will subject your propositions to empirical scrutiny. To this end, you must provide detailed answers to the following questions:
What is your “target population” or who are your research participants?
What are your units of analysis?
How will you find your analytic sample (e.g., through recruitment fliers, participant observation, by mining text corpora, and so on and so forth) and collect qualitative or quantitative data? Please be sure to describe the sampling strategy you plan to deploy. If you are working with pre-existing data, which sources are you drawing on—and why?
What are the key concepts, variables or measures at the heart of your analysis? How will these concepts be operationally defined or translated from abstract ideas into empirically tractable units?
How will you analyze your data (thematic coding, causal narratives, parametric statistics etc.)?
If you have preliminary findings (via pilots or exploratory data analyses), please discuss these results in a dedicated subsection nested within Methodology. In your discussion, be sure to answer the following questions: what patterns have you observed so far? Do they align with your theoretical expectations? How will these provisional findings shape the next steps of your project?
Conclusion (1-2 Pages)
In your concluding section, briefly recapitulate the key arguments advanced in the body of your text. How do your arguments provide analytic utility? Moreover, how will your methodological interventions—as outlined in the proposal—refine our understandings of \(x\), your phenomenon of substantive interest? To furnish an answer, you must situate your insights within the broader canon or literature reviewed in the body of your paper and address relevant counterarguments.
Appendix
You must submit an appendix that includes your CITI Program Completion Certificate. Additional context can be found here. For a small bonus, you may submit a completed draft of your IRB application form, which can be accessed here.
If you plan to collect your own data, you must submit a draft interview guide and/or Qualtrics survey instrument. These documents should be as detailed as possible but will be treated as works-in-progress.5 If you are working with pre-existing data (e.g., existing survey data, text corpora, and so on), you must submit a preliminary data analysis plan that describes how you will pre-process the data, which variables you plan to use, and what tools or specifications will shape estimation.
5 In other words, it’s “fine” if your interview guide or survey instrument lacks polish, but it should still serve as a reasonable first-order approximation of your final product.
Formatting Conventions
Research proposals must be 15-25 pages excluding references, appendices, and so on. As always, you are free to prepare your document in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, \(\LaTeX\), RMarkdown or Quarto. Concretely, this means you can submit your paper as a .docx file or as a . Your main text must be double-spaced and formatted in a 12-point Garamond or Times New Roman font. Margins should be set to 1 inch on all sides (top, bottom, left, and right). You are free to use either an APA or ASA citation style to manage the references you include.
If you haven’t done so already, please invest in Zotero to manage your citations.
You must use subheadings to organize your arguments.