Abstract and Introduction (a.k.a. “Background and Significance”)
The purpose of this paper is for you to develop a research proposal that tests a specific hypothesis or hypotheses of your choice. Do a
literature search to find out all you can about your topic of interest. Use this literature as the basis for your introduction and
justification for the importance of the study. Thus, you will start out with a section much like a “Background and Significance”
section found in grant proposals. In this section, you will answer such questions as “Why is this study important?” “How will this
research contribute to the field of social psychology/the domain of interest?”, and “What will we know about this topic that we did not
know before?” It is not sufficient to say only that your study will fill a gap in the literature. You need to convince the reader that the
gap needs filling. Note that it is not appropriate to simply write an annotated bibliography with paragraph after paragraph describing
random studies on a given topic. Your job is to integrate the literature to tell a story of the state of that topic and help the reader
understand what you’re interested in and why. The overall goal of this part of the paper is to provide a logical argument that leads up
to your hypotheses.
Furthermore, you may read much more than you need to discuss in your introduction. Use only those papers that are directly relevant
to the study you propose. That is, do not discuss every study that is related in any way to the topic. If your topic is so new that there
are very few studies that are relevant, go to those few papers and see how they justified their research. Perhaps you will get clues
about where to look for other literature.
This section should logically conclude with the hypotheses/research questions you plan to test/explore. That is, the arguments should
naturally flow into your plans such that we understand the theoretical basis for your hypotheses/research questions.
Design and Method
In this section you are to describe your plan in detail. Based on the introduction, the reader should be able to see how your research
plan flows logically from your hypotheses and research questions. Who are the proposed participants? Discuss the appropriateness of
this sample population for your study. How do you plan to recruit them? Are there any human subjects concerns? How do you plan
to resolve them? What will you do to guarantee the anonymity of the participants? Will they receive incentives for their
participation?
What are the procedures you will use to test your hypotheses and answer your questions? Give your rationale for the methods you
have chosen. Will this be a longitudinal, cross-sectional and/or diary study? Do you plan to do an experiment? Administer a survey?
Will you record their speech or behaviors during interactions? If you will have open-ended items or recorded observations, discuss
how you plan to code such responses. Are you designing some of your own measures? If so, describe them for the reader and include
the measures in the appendices. If you are using well-known standardized tests, you should still provide a brief description and state
your rationale for using them. Perhaps you plan to use a combination of several methods. Describe the methods in detail as well as
your strategies for analyzing the data. Which variables are predictors, mediators, moderators, and outcomes? Copies of all study
materials (i.e., measures, manipulations, or other stimuli) should appear in appendices.
Be specific in your analytic strategy. In other words, do not merely state that you will use multiple regression, t-test, or ANOVA.
Specify how you will use it. If you are testing a hypothesis (and you should), describe how it will be tested.
Conclusion
Your conclusion should be brief. It should summarize and restate the significance of the work you propose. Discuss the implications
and/or applications if the results turn out as expected. You are also encouraged to add some thought-provoking ideas by proposing
what you would do if your results turned out much differently than you anticipated. What could have gone wrong, and what will you
do about it?
I do not like to give page limits because if you do the job well, you should not need to adhere to a particular number of pages. But I
do understand the need for some kind of framework, so I will say that a ballpark estimate would be around 15-20 double-spaced pages
of text (approximately 20-25 if you count the abstract and references pages), using a 12 pt. font with 1” margins and standard APA
formatting. The number of pages can be higher, but should not be lower.
YOU DONT NEED A RESULT SECTION OR A DISCUSSION.