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[转帖]How to write a Mansholt PhD research proposal
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How to write a Mansholt PhD research proposal In writing your Mansholt PhD research proposal you are advised to keep in mind some general guidelines and to follow a methodological format for designing and formulating your PhD project. These guidelines and designing format will play an important role in the assessment of your proposal. Below you will find an elaboration of these general guidelines and the methodological format respectively. General guidelines A PhD project can either lead to (1) some published papers with an introduction, possibly one or more supportive chapters, a discussion and conclusions at the end, or (2) an integrated thesis. PhD research is non-repetitive: it should contain at least some new elements, either in theory, in methodology or in application. Still it is possible to test a theory, to estimate a model or to do a case study that has quite some similarities with previous research. For case studies, the estimation of models and the testing of theories or of the findings of previous research, it is important that the researcher links her or his results with the available body of knowledge. PhD research of Mansholt Graduate School is intended to contribute to proceedings of conferences and other scientific meetings, to journals (preferably international scientific journals) or books published by scientific publishers. Besides it is important to communicate results in professional journals or newspapers whenever these results raise interest. Mansholt Graduate School encourages practice-oriented research that has a clear link with actual problems in society and with other disciplines: working within a multidisciplinary framework is encouraged. At the end of the project the PhD-researcher should be able to independently carry out scientific research. Further details are communicated in the Introductory Course of Mansholt Graduate School. A Mansholt PhD research project will be judged on the basis of: a. An adequate and elaborate research design as this phenomenon is elaborated below; b. A research methodology that is suitable for gathering the research material and to answer research questions; c. A project design which exploits available knowledge and adds to that; d. The planning of the research (a work plan); e. An adequate supervision by the most suitable experts. Please find below an overview of designing a research project, where the items (a) to (d) are elaborated. It is intended to function as an aid for PhD-students and their supervisors. Designing a PhD-project In this section some ideas are presented about the process of designing a research project and the elements that this design preferably contains. This designing process follows the book Verschuren P. & J. Doorewaard. Designing a Research Project. Lemma, Utrecht 2001. For more details and designing tools the reader is referred to this book. The design of a PhD research, later on to be extended to a methodological chapter or section in your thesis, preferably contains the following six aspects or elements: The link with existing theory. A clear description of the product of the research, i.e. the research goal(s). The research questions to be answered in order to achieve this product or goal. The research strategy and methods to be used. The research material needed to answer the questions. The work plan with an overview of activities, products of these activities and time limits. These six elements should be linked in a logical and understandable way. That is, the task of a research designer is to formulate a clear and feasible goal, to derive research questions from this goal, to select a research strategy, to decide what data or research material is needed to answer the questions, the methods he or she is going to use for processing and analysing this research material in order to find these answers, and finally a work plan that tells what activities are planned to do when, with what results. All this should be steered and inspired as much as is possible by existing theory and the knowledge the researcher already has. The research process may be visualised as in the diagram below. strategy/methods research goal research questions work plan research material The designing process should be carried out in an iterative way. That is, during the designing process the designer has to go continuously back and forth between the five elements of the design plus existing theory in order to see whether reflections on or a (provisional) decision as to one element has repercussions for the other elements. For instance, in thinking about the research questions (after the research goal has been provisionally formulated), the designer may perceive that he or she failed to notice something when formulating the research goal. Thus it should be reformulated. Make sure that, once you changed the research goal(s), you have to check the rest of the design! This is what iterative designing is about. Or, in selecting the research material new ideas about research questions may arise or existing ones may change. If so, the designer has to check whether a change in the research questions asks for a fit of the rest of the design in the making. Designing research thus is a matter of trial and error before the researcher achieves a well balanced design. It is impossible to do this adequately in a linear-serial way. You are strongly advised to co-operate with a colleague PhD (and with your supervisor) in developing your research design in an iterative way. The reason for this is that you need some creativity and imagination and a critical eye as well. These are easier to realise by brainstorming with another person than doing this all by yourself, behind your desk and an empty paper! So, you can help each other! Below the six elements of a research design presented above are elaborated. Links with theory As already stated there should be a clear link between your project and existing theories or (body of) knowledge and/or with research on this subject matter that already has been done. Depending on your discipline and the research tradition of your group or the particular research area, in fact the entire designing process may be guided by existing theory (if any). For instance, the selection and exact formulation of the research aim may be derived from theory, from a generalisation of results, but also from new ideas. The same goes for deriving the research (sub) questions. This is especially the case if the research issue is not (only) built up of research questions, but (also) of hypotheses. This is called hypothesis testing research. An additional linking of the research with existing theory is to present the research results at the end of your project as follows. The researcher ‘predicts’ beforehand the answers to the research questions on the basis of a theory or a set of theories. Next he or she presents the results by describing to what extent these ‘predictions’ appear to be right, i.e. fit reality, and to what extent they do not. To the extent they do not he or she may formulate suggestions why the ‘predictions’ contradict reality, and make suggestions for future research. This is a much more interesting and fruitful way to write the latter part of a thesis than simply to sum up your findings. However, for obvious reasons you have to formulate these ‘predictions’ already at the beginning of your project. They even may make part of your design. In any case these ‘predictions’ should be taken into account in the iterative designing process, in order to make sure that the research may offer the right evidence. Last but not least, theory may also be helpful in defining the main concepts in your research questions, and thus in selecting the empirical data that are needed to cover these concepts and to make it possible to find an answer to the research questions. The research product/goal A research project in principle focuses on one of the three types of objectives below. a. Insights, knowledge or a theory. These may be descriptive (how exactly does the phenomenon look like or how is it built up exactly?) or explanatory (what are the causes or backgrounds of the phenomenon?). What is exactly the phenomenon that you want to describe or explain? What type of insights, knowledge or theory are you aiming at? This type of objectives regards a theory-oriented research. The next two concern practice- oriented research. b. Recommendations to improve something. What exactly do you like to (help to) improve? What type of recommendations do you want to make? For achieving what exactly? And why is this valuable or useful? c. An object, a tool, an instrument, a policy, a plan or something like that. Describe briefly this object, tool, instrument, policy, plan to be produced. Give also a short description of what the tool, instrument et cetera is aiming at and what demands it exactly has to fulfil. Of course achieving one of these objectives may force the researcher first to produce one or both (of the) other products. The project may also generate one or both (of the) other products as a by-product. However, in order to obtain a feasible research the best thing to do is to decide at the beginning on which of the three possible goals you will put an emphasis. Warning: Defining the goal(s) of your research only makes sense if you are as clear, concrete and realistic as possible! Please check these three criteria! The research questions The development of research questions is by far the most complicated and important part of the designing process. You are advised to do this in three steps, followed by checks: 1 Formulate what type of information or knowledge (about what exactly?) must be produced in order to (help to) achieve the research product/goal(s). 2 Then on the basis of (1) you tentatively formulate one or a few (central) research questions, the answers to which represent exactly the knowledge you just mentioned. 3 Next you preferably derive two or more sub questions from each central question in (2), as this may give more steering capacity to your design. (See for steering capacity at [e] below). However, this can only be achieved if the answers to the sub questions together are the answer to the central question from which they were derived, neither less nor more. This in fact means that you can leave out the central question once you formulated the sub questions. This may be a nice check on the adequacy of your sub questions. The reader should make clear that an iterative designing strategy means that this fit may be achieved by adapting either the sub questions, or the main question from which they are derived, or both. Warnings and checks: a You should not formulate a question of the type: 'how can I find... (a solution for..., insight in..., an instrument for... and the like), as this does not help you any further and contains no new information. Synonyms of a ‘how can’ formulation are: ‘What is the best way to…’, ‘what possibility do we have to solve the problem’ and the like. As the reader may check, in fact this how-can type of formulation (mostly) regards the research goal(s). For formulating research questions you have to derive from the research goal(s) what information, knowledge and insights are needed or useful to achieve this goal. b Avoid to present desk-decisions as research questions. Examples are: What literature or theory do we need? How must the central concepts be operationalised? What is the optimal sample size? Et cetera. You have to answer these questions before you start with the research on the basis of your own (or your supervisor’s) common sense or methodological expertise. c Do not formulate questions for an interview instead of research questions. The first ones are to be derived afterwards from the latter ones! d Do not formulate a question (or a hypothesis) starting from scratch. Try to start from as much knowledge as you have already of your subject matter (see also before under the label ‘link with theory). e Check whether each (sub) question makes clear what data are needed for answering it. That is, it should be possible to answer for each (sub) question the questions (a) to (c) below under the heading of ‘The research material’. If these questions cannot be answered in a straightforward way, either the (sub) question is not adequate (see warnings above) or answering them is not feasible. You then have to reformulate your (sub) question (and thus most probably also your research goal), which again is an instance of designing by iteration. f Check for each research (sub)question how an answer to it will contribute to your research goal(s). If this is not clear for somebody else and or asks for much explanation and elaboration, your research question (or the research goal) is not yet clear enough. Continue the process of finding questions that have a clear contribution to achieving your research goal (and or adapt the research goal). Describe shortly what each (sub) question contributes to what part of the research objective! In a later stage of your research project this subsection on research questions should be extended by an operationalisation ( = translation into sensory observations) of the main concepts in your research questions. So at the end your research questions may cover a whole section. |
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fennhuie
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The research strategy/methods Please specify in this section how you think you are going to gather or generate the research material and, once gathered or generated, how you plan to process it in order to find answers to your research questions, and/or to test your hypotheses (if any). If you plan to do a quantitative research you have to specify what type of quantitative research you plan to do (one shot survey, a panel research, a trend study, an experiment and the like). You also specify what type of data analysis you plan to do and what methods you are going to use (multivariate analysis techniques). In case of a qualitative research please specify what type of research it is (a comparative case study, a field research, interpretative research or so). Your research strategy may also consist of building and handling a computer model, gaming (simulation with people) or computer simulation. Please try to make clear or plausible how your strategy and methods will contribute to answering your research questions and/or to test your hypotheses. The research material Answer the next three questions for each research (sub) question! a What sources of knowledge are you planning to consult (experts and literature). b What secondary empirical data do you need? c What empirical data (research material) do you have to gather or to generate yourself? Where will you find these data and or how are you going to gather or generate these data (observation, questioning, content analysis of written and audio-visual documents)? Describe shortly how the answer to your research questions can be obtained from these data.. Besides you have to answer the next question for the project as a whole, i.e. for the set of research (sub) questions. d How do you plan to select your data sources or data? This is a matter of sampling, either random sampling or strategic sampling. The first alternative regards a quantitative research with many data(sources), the second fits a qualitative research with only a few cases. To answer this question you must in any of the two cases define your population of interest, i.e. the domain about which you exactly want to produce knowledge. Describing carefully the boundaries of this population helps a lot in getting clear what your research exactly is about and what is the reach of it. Try to be realistic at this point! This forces you to reduce your project to a feasible size, which is a first condition for its success. Next you define criteria that will be used in the selection process. Work plan A final aspect of a research design is a work plan. The art of making a plan for your PhD project is to cut the whole job into pieces, and to do this in a reasonable and realistic way. This plan must make clear what activities should be done within certain time limits. It should also specify what is the product or what are the results of a given time period. There are several possible dimensions along which this unravelling into pieces of a research project may be done. One of them is splitting up the project in the following four stages: (a) making operational the research design, (b) gathering and/or generating the research material (data), (c) processing the data or the material, (d) analysing it and (e) to write the final report. However, this is a very linear way of proceeding. It often fits a quantitative type of research. In case of a qualitative research you may prefer to carry out the research in a (more or less) iterative way. (So you not only do the designing in an iterative way as this was the advice above, but also the carrying out of the research!). In that case you might for instance prefer to split up the project in subprojects, each consisting of answering one of the research (sub)questions or one of the hypotheses to be tested. |
2楼2006-06-19 10:21:48
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3楼2006-06-19 10:26:11