Research Proposal: Step Two
Your literature review should include the following (steps 1, 2, 4 and 5 will be from your Step One Assignment):
Step 1: Rationale/Problem Statement for the research topic of your choice: Explain your topic. Make a case for why this topic is important to the field of psychology.
Step 2: Research questions you have developed for your topic: Conclude your discussion of the research topic by identifying specific research question(s) about the relationships between two or more concepts. Use both the textbook and the Pajares (2007) website to formulate specific research questions.
Step 3:
A 5-6 page literature review on the 5-7 articles you selected: Read your articles thoroughly and provide a literature review that synthesizes what was theorized and discovered about regarding your topic. Do not write separate “summaries” for each article; rather, find connected themes or relationships in the different areas you cover. Use these relationships to frame your discussion of how variables were indicated, samples were obtained, and research designs were constructed.
Are there any gaps or weaknesses present in the literature that can be investigated further? You will not necessarily refer to all the information from each article; instead, relate only that which is relevant to your topic and research question. Thus, your literature review should justify your study and support why conducting your proposed study would answer a problem that is not already well understood.
Step 4: Hypotheses that you want to test: Considering your research question or statement of the problem, formulate a hypothesis that states the relationships between the variables and answers the research question. Remember that hypotheses make statements or predictions about something that may be true.
Thus, they are hunches or intuitions about what the study’s results may show about the variables being tested.
Step 5: Dependent and independent variables: Operationally define the dependent and independent variables for each hypothesis
