components of thesis proposal

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Chapter 14: The Research Proposal

14.3 Components of a Research Proposal

Krathwohl (2005) suggests and describes a variety of components to include in a research proposal. The following sections – Introductions, Background and significance, Literature Review; Research design and methods, Preliminary suppositions and implications; and Conclusion present these components in a suggested template for you to follow in the preparation of your research proposal.

Introduction

The introduction sets the tone for what follows in your research proposal – treat it as the initial pitch of your idea. After reading the introduction your reader should:

• understand what it is you want to do;
• have a sense of your passion for the topic; and
• be excited about the study’s possible outcomes.

As you begin writing your research proposal, it is helpful to think of the introduction as a narrative of what it is you want to do, written in one to three paragraphs. Within those one to three paragraphs, it is important to briefly answer the following questions:

• What is the central research problem?
• How is the topic of your research proposal related to the problem?
• What methods will you utilize to analyze the research problem?
• Why is it important to undertake this research? What is the significance of your proposed research? Why are the outcomes of your proposed research important? Whom are they important?

Note : You may be asked by your instructor to include an abstract with your research proposal. In such cases, an abstract should provide an overview of what it is you plan to study, your main research question, a brief explanation of your methods to answer the research question, and your expected findings. All of this information must be carefully crafted in 150 to 250 words. A word of advice is to save the writing of your abstract until the very end of your research proposal preparation. If you are asked to provide an abstract, you should include 5 to 7 key words that are of most relevance to your study. List these in order of relevance.

Background and Significance

The purpose of this section is to explain the context of your proposal and to describe, in detail, why it is important to undertake this research. Assume that the person or people who will read your research proposal know nothing or very little about the research problem. While you do not need to include all knowledge you have learned about your topic in this section, it is important to ensure that you include the most relevant material that will help to explain the goals of your research.

While there are no hard and fast rules, you should attempt to address some or all of the following key points:

• State the research problem and provide a more thorough explanation about the purpose of the study than what you stated in the introduction.
• Present the rationale for the proposed research study. Clearly indicate why this research is worth doing. Answer the “so what?” question.
• Describe the major issues or problems to be addressed by your research. Do not forget to explain how and in what ways your proposed research builds upon previous related research.
• Explain how you plan to go about conducting your research.
• Clearly identify the key or most relevant sources of research you intend to use and explain how they will contribute to your analysis of the topic.
• Set the boundaries of your proposed research, in order to provide a clear focus. Where appropriate, state not only what you will study, but what will be excluded from your study.
• Provide clear definitions of key concepts and terms. Since key concepts and terms often have numerous definitions, make sure you state which definition you will be utilizing in your research.

Literature Review

This key component of the research proposal is the most time-consuming aspect in the preparation of your research proposal. As described in Chapter 5 , the literature review provides the background to your study and demonstrates the significance of the proposed research. Specifically, it is a review and synthesis of prior research that is related to the problem you are setting forth to investigate. Essentially, your goal in the literature review is to place your research study within the larger whole of what has been studied in the past, while demonstrating to your reader that your work is original, innovative, and adds to the larger whole.

As the literature review is information dense, it is essential that this section be intelligently structured to enable your reader to grasp the key arguments underpinning your study. However, this can be easier to state and harder to do, simply due to the fact there is usually a plethora of related research to sift through. Consequently, a good strategy for writing the literature review is to break the literature into conceptual categories or themes, rather than attempting to describe various groups of literature you reviewed. Chapter 5   describes a variety of methods to help you organize the themes.

Here are some suggestions on how to approach the writing of your literature review:

• Think about what questions other researchers have asked, what methods they used, what they found, and what they recommended based upon their findings.
• Do not be afraid to challenge previous related research findings and/or conclusions.
• Assess what you believe to be missing from previous research and explain how your research fills in this gap and/or extends previous research.

It is important to note that a significant challenge related to undertaking a literature review is knowing when to stop. As such, it is important to know when you have uncovered the key conceptual categories underlying your research topic. Generally, when you start to see repetition in the conclusions or recommendations, you can have confidence that you have covered all of the significant conceptual categories in your literature review. However, it is also important to acknowledge that researchers often find themselves returning to the literature as they collect and analyze their data. For example, an unexpected finding may develop as you collect and/or analyze the data; in this case, it is important to take the time to step back and review the literature again, to ensure that no other researchers have found a similar finding. This may include looking to research outside your field.

This situation occurred with one of this textbook’s authors’ research related to community resilience. During the interviews, the researchers heard many participants discuss individual resilience factors and how they believed these individual factors helped make the community more resilient, overall. Sheppard and Williams (2016) had not discovered these individual factors in their original literature review on community and environmental resilience. However, when they returned to the literature to search for individual resilience factors, they discovered a small body of literature in the child and youth psychology field. Consequently, Sheppard and Williams had to go back and add a new section to their literature review on individual resilience factors. Interestingly, their research appeared to be the first research to link individual resilience factors with community resilience factors.

Research design and methods

The objective of this section of the research proposal is to convince the reader that your overall research design and methods of analysis will enable you to solve the research problem you have identified and also enable you to accurately and effectively interpret the results of your research. Consequently, it is critical that the research design and methods section is well-written, clear, and logically organized. This demonstrates to your reader that you know what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. Overall, you want to leave your reader feeling confident that you have what it takes to get this research study completed in a timely fashion.

Essentially, this section of the research proposal should be clearly tied to the specific objectives of your study; however, it is also important to draw upon and include examples from the literature review that relate to your design and intended methods. In other words, you must clearly demonstrate how your study utilizes and builds upon past studies, as it relates to the research design and intended methods. For example, what methods have been used by other researchers in similar studies?

While it is important to consider the methods that other researchers have employed, it is equally, if not more, important to consider what methods have not been but could be employed. Remember, the methods section is not simply a list of tasks to be undertaken. It is also an argument as to why and how the tasks you have outlined will help you investigate the research problem and answer your research question(s).

Tips for writing the research design and methods section

Specify the methodological approaches you intend to employ to obtain information and the techniques you will use to analyze the data.

Specify the research operations you will undertake and the way you will interpret the results of those operations in relation to the research problem.

Go beyond stating what you hope to achieve through the methods you have chosen. State how you will actually implement the methods (i.e., coding interview text, running regression analysis, etc.).

Anticipate and acknowledge any potential barriers you may encounter when undertaking your research, and describe how you will address these barriers.

Explain where you believe you will find challenges related to data collection, including access to participants and information.

Preliminary Suppositions and Implications

The purpose of this section is to argue how you anticipate that your research will refine, revise, or extend existing knowledge in the area of your study. Depending upon the aims and objectives of your study, you should also discuss how your anticipated findings may impact future research. For example, is it possible that your research may lead to a new policy, theoretical understanding, or method for analyzing data? How might your study influence future studies? What might your study mean for future practitioners working in the field? Who or what might benefit from your study? How might your study contribute to social, economic or environmental issues? While it is important to think about and discuss possibilities such as these, it is equally important to be realistic in stating your anticipated findings. In other words, you do not want to delve into idle speculation. Rather, the purpose here is to reflect upon gaps in the current body of literature and to describe how you anticipate your research will begin to fill in some or all of those gaps.

The conclusion reiterates the importance and significance of your research proposal, and provides a brief summary of the entire proposed study. Essentially, this section should only be one or two paragraphs in length. Here is a potential outline for your conclusion:

Discuss why the study should be done. Specifically discuss how you expect your study will advance existing knowledge and how your study is unique.

Explain the specific purpose of the study and the research questions that the study will answer.

Explain why the research design and methods chosen for this study are appropriate, and why other designs and methods were not chosen.

State the potential implications you expect to emerge from your proposed study,

Provide a sense of how your study fits within the broader scholarship currently in existence, related to the research problem.

Citations and References

As with any scholarly research paper, you must cite the sources you used in composing your research proposal. In a research proposal, this can take two forms: a reference list or a bibliography. A reference list lists the literature you referenced in the body of your research proposal. All references in the reference list must appear in the body of the research proposal. Remember, it is not acceptable to say “as cited in …” As a researcher you must always go to the original source and check it for yourself. Many errors are made in referencing, even by top researchers, and so it is important not to perpetuate an error made by someone else. While this can be time consuming, it is the proper way to undertake a literature review.

In contrast, a bibliography , is a list of everything you used or cited in your research proposal, with additional citations to any key sources relevant to understanding the research problem. In other words, sources cited in your bibliography may not necessarily appear in the body of your research proposal. Make sure you check with your instructor to see which of the two you are expected to produce.

Overall, your list of citations should be a testament to the fact that you have done a sufficient level of preliminary research to ensure that your project will complement, but not duplicate, previous research efforts. For social sciences, the reference list or bibliography should be prepared in American Psychological Association (APA) referencing format. Usually, the reference list (or bibliography) is not included in the word count of the research proposal. Again, make sure you check with your instructor to confirm.

Research Methods for the Social Sciences: An Introduction Copyright © 2020 by Valerie Sheppard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Thesis Proposal

Criteria for success.

A thesis proposal should allow your audience to understand the topic of your project, the goals of the work, and the expected timeline to completion. To be successful, a thesis proposal should:

• follow departmental guidelines for thesis proposal content, structure, and formatting.
• provide necessary background for understanding the work that you propose.
• answer the Heilmeier questions to concretely explain what you are trying to do and how you will achieve it.
• include a timeline for the expected remaining work in the thesis, including tasks and dates of completion.

Structure Diagram

As with all communication projects, the right length for a thesis proposal is “however long it takes to convey your message effectively.” While the goal should be effectiveness rather than length, a general rule of thumb is to consider 8-12 pages for an MEng or SM proposal and 10-20 pages for a PhD proposal.

The main components of a thesis proposal are:

• title and abstract,
• introduction that motivates the proposed work,
• related and/or preliminary work, and
• proposed future work, including a timeline to complete that work.

There should also be a references section that contains all necessary citations. The following diagrams provide examples of potential thesis proposal organizations and their relative size. Note that the section headings as well as the size and ordering of the sections may be flexible.

Always be sure to follow the most up-to-date department guidelines.

MEng/SM Proposal

For MEng thesis proposals, the MIT EECS guidelines for MEng thesis proposals suggest that these documents should be between 1500-2500 words.

For SM proposals, the MIT EECS guidelines for SM and PhD thesis proposals indicate that the research plan should also include a list of principal equipment and facilities needs and the places which will supply these needs.

PhD Proposal

For a PhD thesis proposal, it is important to think about how the work that will go into your thesis ties together. What is the main idea that your work supports?

A thesis proposal serves as a contract between you and your thesis committee. The document should demonstrate the feasibility and merit of your proposed project and clearly define the work you will have to accomplish to complete your degree. This assures your committee that you have agreed to an acceptable level of research and protects you against future attempts to increase your workload. For this reason, it is advisable to have a thesis proposal written and signed relatively early in the degree process.

Thesis proposals also provide an opportunity for you to sharpen your research by stepping back and looking at the big picture. By carefully planning your research, you will focus on the most important questions and the most effective ways to answer them.

Analyze Your Audience

The primary audience of your thesis proposal is your thesis committee (for SM and MEng students, the committee is simply your advisor), who will serve multiple roles: they are coaches who support your success and gatekeepers who ensure that degrees are only granted for sufficient quality of work. In their role as coaches, committee members want to know that your project is feasible and worth pursuing and that you are prepared to undertake it. In their role as gatekeepers, committee members want to see that your project showcases mastery of a subject and solves an important and novel problem.

In the future, other students may also read your proposal as a reference to build on your work or use it as a model for their own. Therefore, your proposal should include both a concrete description of your work and the necessary background to understand the topic.

Answer the Heilmeier Questions

Before you start writing your thesis, consider the main motivations of the work and your approach. One great way to start brainstorming for your thesis proposal is to answer the Heilmeier questions for your own work.

In the 1970’s, the director of DARPA (George Heilmeier) developed a list of questions, known as the Heilmeier Catechism , to produce and select productive research proposals. To outline the content of your proposal, start by answering the following questions:

• What problem needs solving? What are you trying to do?
• How is it done today? What are the limitations of the current practice?
• What is new in your approach and why do you think it can succeed?
• Assuming you are successful, what difference does it make? Who cares and why?
• How much time/money/risk will it take?
• How will you (periodically) measure success?

You have many available resources for answering the Heilmeier questions. Start with your research advisor; they can point you to the most relevant literature, help identify productive research directions, and refine your plan for feasibility and scope. Other group members as well as past papers and theses from your group may also be able to help.

Emphasize your contribution

A thesis proposal should emphasize the problem and proposed work. Try to spend about 25% of your proposal on background and 75% on what you propose to do and a timeline to completion.

Include a timeline for completion

A timeline is a required component of almost any project proposal and should show that you have thought through the overall project goals and how to achieve them in accomplishable steps. The timeline should be granular enough to be meaningful (typically, a few months at a time) but not so granular to be vulnerable to small perturbations. Your timeline should allow your advisor or another evaluator to determine credibility, feasibility, and worthiness of the project steps.

Demonstrate creativity while maintaining credibility

In any research proposal, there is a tradeoff between risk/reward, and credibility. Low risk projects, like obvious, simple extensions of previous work, tend to be very credible; it’s clear that you can do them. They also tend to be low reward. Projects that are very ambitious and have huge rewards tend to be unbelievable and impossible for a single grad student. A successful proposal involves balancing the two: find a problem that you can probably solve that demonstrates creativity, initiative, and understanding.

Include details and preliminary results in your plan

Thesis proposals should do more than merely promise to “investigate” something.  Your proposal must describe how you plan to accomplish your goals, why you think those approaches will be successful, and why you believe these approaches have been overlooked or unsuccessful before. Initial experiments, calculations, or simulations can be crucial to convincing the proposal readers that your project will be successful.

MIT EECS affiliates can make an appointment with an EECS Comm Lab Fellow to get feedback on their proposal at any stage.

Resources and Annotated Examples

Meng thesis proposal example 1.

Thesis proposal submitted by MIT EECS MEng student 1 MB

MEng thesis proposal example 2

Thesis proposal submitted by MIT EECS MEng student 2 MB