- [Instructor] This is part two of the video lecture
on research design.
Now I'm going to walk you through the basic elements,
or the building blocks of a proposal design.
So these are the things that you will usually include
in a proposal.
Very often, you will be responding to what's called an RFP,
a Request for Proposals.
So funder, in my case it very often tends to be USDA,
puts out an RFP and says,
we are looking for researchers to submit proposals
that will do research on these kinds of areas.
And then I, it's part of my job to respond to those
to bring in money, which helps pay for graduate students
and helps basically to pay for the expenses of my research.
Maybe I travel,
paying research subjects,
eventually paying page charges for peer-reviewed articles.
All those things may be in the budget.
Basically, this is how you ask for money to do research.
So I'm gonna walk through each of these things,
but here are the building blocks.
So you start with a problem or objective.
You say, what are you studying?
You (murmurs) probably will wanna make a good case
of why is it worth studying?
So what?
What's the problem that it addresses?
How does it contribute to knowledge?
So you wanna make clear up front,
this is the problem that I'll be addressing,
this is the objective, this is what I hope to accomplish.
As we did in this class,
you wanna do a really good lit review.
So you wanna walk through what have prior studies learned?
What do we know? How did they do it?
And where are the gaps?
And an important thing is you want to position
your research objectives to fill a gap
that you identify in the lit review.
You wanna walk through the subjects.
Who are you going to collect data from, and why?
Next, you wanna talk about the methods.
First, how will you collect data?
Are you doing surveys?
Are you doing interviews?
Are you analyzing secondary data?
But it's very important that your methods
link very clearly to your objectives.
And you can see that the reader can see
if the researcher successfully executes these methods,
the objectives that they state in the beginning
will be filled.
Next, you want to walk through
how are you going to analyze data?
So you want there to be a logical flow.
You want to assure the reader that your methods are sound
and especially will achieve the research goals
that the analysis will give results
which will fill that gap and meet the objective.
Next, you're gonna wanna talk about the dissemination plan.
How are you going to communicate the results?
It might be that you'll do a report to the funder.
In many cases, in my world,
you wanna do a scholarly journal article.
You might do presentations, develop a toolkit to outreach,
but you want to talk about how that is done.
And finally, you want to have a schedule.
So you want to use a Gantt chart like this,
where you map out what are the activities
that you'll be doing, and when do you do them?
Near the end of the proposal,
you're gonna want to include a budget,
and here are some of the items that you will often find.
Personnel costs for those researchers
who are going to work on it.
Travels costs to collect data,
to meet with project partners,
to present results, subject compensation,
so if you're paying your research subjects,
you often have to pay to publish
or to do any outreach of your results
and then materials and supplies.
So the key takeaways here
are the time dimension and options of how we measure
and the design components of a proposal.
This is the end of part two.
This is the last part of this,
so please make sure to do the assessment
before we watch this in class, thank you.