Research proposal

Order Description

HUSO2079 Research Strategies Assessment Task 3: Instructions

The purpose of this assessment is for you to demonstrate your ability to engage with good research design. Within each of the draft research proposals, there are numerous errors, both major and minor, in each of the key sections (e.g. background and research question, literature review, sampling & recruitment & method, ethics). Your task is to select one of these proposals, read it to identify the errors and propose an alternative strategy to address these errors by utilising the principles of good research design. You will need to reference your responses by drawing on the course materials and by finding other sources.

Some questions to guide your evaluation of the proposals:
– How well does the background align with the research question?
o Does the kind of question being asked align with the research background / aims?
– Does the literature review adequately justify the research question?
o Was the literature review undertaken appropriately?
– Does the literature review identify any of the key ideas, concepts or theories being explored in the method?
– Is the population / sample appropriate for the research question?
– Is the recruitment method appropriate for the research question?
o Is this ethical?
– Does the research method align with the research question?
o What sorts of data will it generate? Will this be useful data?
– Is the method adequately explained?
o Is the method ethical?
– How will the data be analysed to generate answers to the research question?

– Are the potential ethical issues adequately addressed?
Some suggested resources:
Denscombe, M 2012, Research Proposals, 1st ed., pp. 3-15, McGraw-Hill Education, Maidenhead, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=1037303
Denscombe, M 2010, Good Research Guide, 4th ed., McGraw-Hill Education, Maindenhead, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=650320
Vogt, WP, Gardner, DC &Haeffele, LM 2012, When to Use What Research Design, Guildford Publications, New York, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=873354
RMIT Library Social Research Methods Resources: https://rmit.libguides.com/researchmethods#s-lg-box-11043811
Week 10: Social Science Research Ethics
https://www.nhmrc.gov.au/book/section-1-values-and-principles-ethical-conduct
Week 7: Sampling
https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=650320
https://lms.rmit.edu.au/bbcswebdav/pid-8206448-dt-content-rid-19190853_1/xid-19190853_1
Week 6: Developing a Researchable Quesiton
https://lms.rmit.edu.au/bbcswebdav/pid-8192683-dt-content-rid-19101951_1/xid-19101951_1
Week 6: The Social Construction of Social Problems
Attached Files:
06_Clarke and Cochrane 1998 The Social Construction of Social Problems.pdf (1.618 MB)

below is the draft proposal
Scenario:Planning and Public Policy
You work for a private consultancy firm that is bidding to conduct research commissioned by a state government agency. Applicants must submit a research proposal, following a format provided by the agency.
Your department has established a peer mentoring program to help its members submit effective bids for government contracts. As a peer mentor, your job is to:
– Identify potential problems in draft research proposals;

– Suggest means to address those problems; and

– Clearly explain the basis for your recommendations, by linking them to sources that support your criticisms and recommendations (these sources should include course lectures, assigned readings, and your own independent readings).
You have received the following draft proposal. The organisations instructions to applicants are provided in blue italic type. The applicants responses are in black standard type.
Write a report that presents your written feedback to the applicant on how they can improve their research proposal by proposing an alternative strategy, drawing on your learning from the course. You may want to set your report out using relevant subheadings as in the proposal (research question and background, literature review, sampling / recruitment and method, ethical considerations).
?
Introduction and background:
State the question your research will answer and explain the benefits of the proposed research to the organisation or the local community.
The Australian housing affordability crisis has attracted increasing attention. Conflicting policy proposals represent the causes of the problem and therefore the potential solutions in conflicting ways. Blame has been placed on factors as diverse as: restrictions on development; disinvestment in social and public housing; insufficient income redistribution; overseas investment; tax policy; speculative investment in a housing bubble; and other factors.
Our research will therefore prove that the housing affordability crisis can be solved by policies that promote better urban design.

Literature review:
State the literature search strategies you have used to determine whether previous research has answered this question. Summarise the major lines of research that have already been conducted on this question.
We conducted a systematic literature search through the Google Scholar academic database, using the search term housing. This search returned 3,980,000 results in 0.05 seconds, which was obviously more than could be reasonably assessed by our research team. We therefore limited our reading to results from the first five pages returned by Google Scholar. Some articles were unavailable to readers without a university affiliation. We therefore excluded those results. This left us with a pool of 37 articles we could access, which seem to us to represent a reasonable cross-section of the literature on this issue. From this cross-section, it is clear that no one has provided a final, generally accepted, answer to our research question.

Method:
Describe how you would carry out the research and explain why this method is appropriate given your research question. Outline the financial and practical support required to carry out the project successfully.
This research will be conducted in two stages. In the first stage, we will conduct a critical policy analysis of how the problem of housing affordability is currently framed in a representative sample of Australian policy documents. To obtain this sample, we will contact all local government areas in West Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory and request copies of any Council policies or statements relating to housing affordability. We will then code these documents according to whether each document presents the primary cause of the housing affordability crisis to be urban design or other. We expect that this policy analysis will demonstrate that most policy documents fail to identify urban design as a major factor in the housing affordability crisis.
In the second stage, we will prove that urban design is the most important factor, by interviewing a random sample of architects and city planners. The sample frame for interview participants will be taken from the membership lists of relevant professional associations in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales. To ensure that the sample is truly random, we will first sort the membership list by the post code of each professionals office address. We will then select the first name listed alphabetically within each post code. If the first person listed under each post code fails to respond to the invitation to participate, we will move to the next name in that post code.
Invitations will be sent to the office email mail addresses of each participant. To preserve the privacy of personal information for participants, the professional association has agreed to send these emails on our behalf. To improve the response rate, the professional association has also agreed to say that participation in this research is a requirement for continuing professional registration in that state.
Participants will be invited to nominate a time and place for the interviews, which will take 45-60 minutes. Interviews will be semi-structured, and will ask participants to reflect on all of the different ways in which urban design techniques can address the housing affordability crisis in Australia. The interviewer will carry sample photographs of good urban design techniques from countries that do not have housing affordability crises. These photographs will be used as prompts to invite interview participants to reflect on why these good urban design techniques have solved the housing affordability problems elsewhere.
Interviews will be audio-recorded on a digital device that ensures that the data can be immediately password-protected and encrypted. Audio files will then be partially transcribed, with an emphasis on capturing quotations that most clearly and powerfully express the positive impacts of good urban design. All quotations will be attributed to the interviewee by name, as we expect professionals to be more honest if they have reason to believe their professional reputation depends on the accuracy of their answers.
Funding is sought for a thirty-person research team who propose to work full-time for five years on this project to ensure comprehensive results.

Ethics:
Please use the following table to highlight major ethical risks for the project, and to discuss how you would eliminate or manage these risks.
Type of risk Specific risks Strategies
Physical Participants could potentially choose to hold interviews in unsafe locations such as construction sites. Interviewers will take all reasonable precautions, including attending site safety briefings and wearing all required safety clothing for the site.
Psychological N/A
Social N/A
Legal N/A
Financial N/A
Other Participants do not really have the right to refuse to participate in the interview portion of this research, since the professional association has agreed to make continued professional registration contingent on participation. Professionals are required to meet the standards of their professional association in many other respects. We do not view the inability to decline to participate in this research as significant in the context of other requirements imposed by the professional association.
Currently 1 writers are viewing this order