Research Design (15% of your grade)

This exercise will give you a chance to get feedback from me on your research project well before you are so deeply into it that there's no going back. Aim for 500-750 words.

Whether your research project is qualitative, quantitative, or some mixture of the two, every good piece of resarch begins with a plan, also known as your research design. When you write up your work for your research report, the design morphs into the methods section (or segment) of your report. For guidance, efer to Berger, pp. 255--257 for an account of the "Method" section of a Research Report.

Writing up the design, though, won't be very helpful without some brief introduction that provides some background situating the report within a general sense of what the ongoing conversation about its subject is. That's just an academic and pedantic way of saying the reader of your research design document (me) will need to know what you are investigating and WHY. The 'why' has to persuade your readers that the effort to do the investigating in the first place is really worth the whistle. Worthwhile research tends to tackle a question people are already interested in or concerned about, so there's likely to be some prior discourse on the topic, or at least in the general vicinity of the topic. Your sense of the prior discourse will form the foundation of your research report's "literature review." (See Berger, p. 255, for a very brief account of a literature review.)

The introduction to your research design assignment will ultimately morph into the introduction to your final research report.