Description of a Thesis Proposal and its Parts

THE TOPIC STATEMENT

Your topic statement (due in late spring of the junior year)  should include a working title, a brief description of your proposed thesis (no more than 250 words) and the names of at least 2 faculty members with whom you would like to work.

THE FINAL THESIS PROPOSAL

A thesis proposal is a paper in which you define a topic for research, and describe how you would collect and analyze data to study that topic. What actually goes into a proposal depends in part on the topic you are interested in, and whether you want to test a hypothesis or model that is already well-defined, or explore a topic to develop such a model. It also depends on the kind of research that you plan. You need to provide the following information in any proposal:

1. What is the topic that you want to study?
2. What do social scientists already know about this topic?
3. Why do we need to know more? How would your research build on, modify, or correct errors in previous work on this topic?
4. What exactly would you do? (Collect a survey? Conduct in-depth personal interviews? Participant observations? Analyze secondary sources? What approximate timetable would you use? In the case of empirical research, who would be your subjects? How would you analyze and/or interpret the data you collect?
5. How would what you propose to do in #4 above address the shortcomings or needs identified in #3?

This means that your proposal should contain several parts:

1. An introduction

The introduction should set the topic you propose to study within a broader social scientific context. Generally, it should be ½ to 1 page in length.

2. A review of the pertinent scholarly literature

The purpose of the literature review is to develop the rationale for why you focus on the specific topic you have selected. The literature review should summarize and (briefly) critique what social scientists already know about your topic, and should indicate the major theoretical assumptions, concepts, and issues (both theoretical and empirical) that social scientists have been concerned with in studying this topic. Your task is to analyze and organize previous thinking and research, and identify its major strengths and weaknesses as they pertain to your topic.

The scope of your literature review will vary depending on the topic, and whether your proposed research is exploratory or aimed at testing a hypothesis/model. For example, suppose you are interested in the relationship between sex and income. There is a voluminous literature available on the determinants of income and social mobility. Rather than writing a book, review the current work that specifically address your topic. You do not, for example, need to discuss literature on race and income unless you draw important ideas or concepts for your own hypotheses or research questions from that literature. In fact, in determining the lacunae in one body of literature, we often make reference to concepts applied in another, related body that could shed light on our specific topic.

On the other hand, you may select a topic on which very little has been written. In that case, you might have to search much further afield. Can you draw on ideas from research on related topics? Or, must you develop your own hypotheses/research questions by drawing on general theoretical perspectives? In this case, you would refer only to those sources you actually used directly in developing your research topic.

Depending on the volume of literature available on your topic and the complexity of your topic, your literature review is likely to be from four to seven pages in length. This means it needs to be very concise. Sentences with long lists of citations, bad taste in essays, are common in literature reviews. (Nonetheless, such “citation banks” need to have enough specificity to make sense!)

3. Definition of the research problem

In this section, you state the hypothesis or model you intend to test or discuss the research questions you intend to explore. If you are testing hypotheses, be sure to define any ambiguous concepts and state your scope conditions. The hypotheses should be stated clearly and in such a way as to be true or false. If you are formulating a set of research questions to explore, you should still be sure to define any ambiguous concepts, but wouldn’t have to worry about true/false testability. This section of a proposal will vary in length depending on how many hypotheses/questions you deal with and how directly they follow from the literature you have reviewed. So, this section might be anywhere from one [unusually brief] to five pages in length.

4. A description of your proposed research methods

This section of the paper should identify the unit of analysis for your study, the population and sample on which you focus, observation and measurement techniques, and (if appropriate) how you will analyze the data. For example, if you are collecting original data, you must indicate how you will collect it (participant observation, survey, interviews…). What are the topics you will focus on? What topics will be covered in your interview schedule or questionnaire? What kind of field observations would you focus on? Most importantly, what are the strengths and limitations of the research methods you have outlined, especially with regard to your research problem (in other words, what is your rationale for choosing these methods)? This section of the proposal usually requires about three to five pages, although often less for a project based solely on participant observation.

The page guidelines given above are approximate. By these guidelines, your proposal could be anywhere from eight to eighteen pages in length; for most thesis topics, we expect that your proposal would be at least 12 pages in length. As for the number of articles and/or books that make a reasonable literature review, there are no firm guidelines. It depends on the scope of the pertinent literature.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND HINTS

· Organizing a literature review: The library staff will have suggestions to simplify your journey through the numerous reference sources available at Carleton’s library. Your life will be much more pleasant if you use these suggestions and the reference staff (after all, they are paid to help you). Also, make as much use as possible of the abstracting sources; reading abstracts and reviews first will save you the frustration of reading irrelevant or crummy articles and books. Recent articles in the top journals (e.g. American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology) will provide models of a finished literature review and help you in organizing your own. Without such a model, it can be frustrating to organize the literature you read, especially if there is a lot of it. Logical grouping of works along the dimensions of your research problem is key.

· Evaluation of a thesis proposal: Several factors will figure into the department’s assessment of your proposal and its feasibility as a thesis topic. The intrinsic merit of proposed research is one of these factors. Is your proposed research adequately framed as a sociological or anthropological inquiry? In addition, in reviewing your thesis proposal we will consider the soundness of your proposed research approach (both conceptual and methodological), the adequacy of the resources available for carrying out your proposed study, and your preparation for carrying out the proposed work.

· Annotated bibliography: You should append an annotated bibliography of scholarly works that you have consulted and that you plan to consult for your comps. The annotated bibliography should be formatted according to an acceptable citation style (see above), and should include 2-4 lines of annotation per item. Annotations should indicate what the article or book is about and its relevance for your comps project.