Preparing a research proposal for a student research dissertation: a pedagogic note

Abstract

When students are required to engage in research of one kind or another and to produce dissertations – whether as a substantial component of a research degree or as a lesser component in a taught degree – the research proposal is a crucial pedagogic mechanism. But whilst textbooks give guidance on the preparation of such a proposal they rarely provide an illustration of what a proposal might look like. This short note attempts to overcome this lack. It provides a fictitious proposal of a fictitious project in a form that may well be required of accounting and finance students. The note also provides some discussion about the process of construction of the proposal and then undertakes a brief auto-critique of the proposal itself. The note is intended, principally, to be used with students to help them in the construction of their own research proposals.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge support, suggestions and help received from both their colleagues and students in the development of this note. We also would like to make especial acknowledgement of the helpful suggestions and support received from the Editor and two anonymous referees.

Notes

¹The illustration is a fictitious one. There are inevitable trade-offs in choosing between a proposal which reflects aspects of ‘real’ accounting proposals and choosing a fictitious proposal which may not seem to relate to accounting directly. The abstract (even irrelevant) nature of the proposal is intended to force the student: to concentrate; to feel less silly about asking questions (which otherwise might seem ‘obvious’); and to be forced to recognize that concentration and imagination are essential – although elusive – components of any reasonable research proposal.

²If time permits, seminars/tutorials based around one or more student proposals from earlier years of the course would provide an excellent supplement to this fictitious proposal.

³Limitations not explicitly covered here – for reasons of, inter alia, brevity – would include the student's own research skills. These cover the whole range of issues that all research training needs to address from relative ability with methods (e.g. statistics) to library searches and record keeping. Key to this will be issues of self-knowledge, self-discipline and personal organization and time-keeping. An essential component that staff are required to explicitly consider is the practicality of a research proposal and the student's capacity to plan, organize and stick closely to the time line. Self-help techniques as well as other forms of guidance abound in good research training textbooks.

⁴The coverage of methodology in this paper is necessarily both simple and partial. All reasonable research methods texts will provide a wider review of the key issues attendant upon research choice. In addition to the texts already cited, Johnson and Duberly (2000) provides a more than usually accessible discussion of the more generic issues involved in the ontology/epistemology debate. In particular, this text (as does Laughlin 1995 to a degree) points to the use of critical theory and postmodernism as exciting and important perspectives on emerging research. Such perspectives are not, however, to be adopted lightly and are rarely realistic options for undergraduate or master's research proposals.