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Elements of a research proposal and report
2005 © David S. Walonick, Ph.D.
All rights reserved.
Excerpts from Survival Statistics - an applied statistics book for graduate students.
All research reports use roughly the same format. It doesn't matter whether you've done a customer satisfaction survey, an employee opinion survey, a health care survey, or a marketing research survey. All have the same basic structure and format. The rationale is that readers of research reports (i.e., decision makers, funders, etc.) will know exactly where to find the information they are looking for, regardless of the individual report.
Once you've learned the basic rules for research proposal and report writing, you can apply them to any research discipline. The same rules apply to writing a proposal, a thesis, a dissertation, or any business research report.
The Research Proposal and Report
General
Style, layout, and page formatting
Outline of the chapters and sections
Chapter I - Introduction
Chapter II - Background
Chapter III - Methodology
Chapter IV - Results
Chapter V - Conclusions and Recommendations
General considerations
Research papers usually have five chapters with well-established sections in each chapter. Readers of the paper will be looking for these chapters and sections so you should not deviate from the standard format unless you are specifically requested to do so by the research sponsor.
Most research studies begin with a written proposal. Again, nearly all proposals follow the same format. In fact, the proposal is identical to the first three chapters of the final paper except that it's writtten in future tense. In the proposal, you might say something like "the researchers will secure the sample from ...", while in the final paper, it would be changed to "the researchers secured the sample from ...". Once again, with the exception of tense, the proposal becomes the first three chapters of the final research paper.
The most...