How to write a dissertation research proposal? A quick guide for students

Why is there a need to write a dissertation proposal?

“To propose for your research topic, and how will you defend your viewpoints in your research”

We write dissertation proposal to give strong justifications to our research. Make sure you put in every little detail. You need to be confident in your dissertation proposal. If you are not, it will reflect in your whole dissertation. It is mandatory to write dissertation proposal because it answers the following questions;

• What research gap will your work fill?
• How will it affect the society or domain of the study?

Your dissertation proposal writing should be able to advocate for itself.

The contents of a dissertation proposal

Let’s get into the contents of your dissertation proposal. The format for a dissertation proposal differs from university to university. Therefore you need to follow the set of rules that must be provided to you by your professors.
But generally, there are main four contents that dissertation proposals usually have. They are as follows:

Introduction

Your dissertation is your baby, it deserves the proper introduction. It should give the initial overview of your work. An introductory section of your proposal must include the following elements;

• Give a detailed and descriptive title for your research.
• Explain what is the scope of your research? The main benefits of doing this research.
• Give a short background of your research that helped you in identifying the research gap of your research.
• Also, explain ‘’what, why, and how’’ of your research which we have discussed earlier in our guide.

Literature Review

“A literature review is extracted from all the articles, newspapers, books, previous dissertations, published researches, magazines and internet websites that were written on past researches”

All these written material will help provide information on your research. Work is created upon work and these past papers are only going to aid your dissertation. Why do you need literature review and how can you get them?

Why

• Let’s look into a marketing dissertation proposal example. The amount of time and funding it will take a student of marketing to conduct a new research on BTL marketing will be reduced if he/she looks into previous researches done.
• Another example is the research proposal methodology example. Methodology dilemma can be solved. When you look into previous researches, you identify the methods used to conduct the research. You evaluate if the method were helpful to research. If not, what type will you use now?

How

• Investigate for the best and closest researches done to yours
• Organize the researches according to use to your work
• Understand each research with the keenest eye.

Methodology and design

Your proposal will consist of the technical strategies that you will follow. Therefore, you should have complete knowledge of the research designs. There are five research designs:

• Descriptive Research Design
• Co-relational Research Design
• Diagnostic Research Design
• Experimental Research Design
• Explanatory Research Design

The questions that you will answer in this section will be:

• What research methodology will you use, will it be Quantitative or Qualitative?
• How do you plan on collecting your data? What method of data collection will you follow?
• What type of questions would you be considering. Will they be open-ended or close-ended?
• Will there be one on one interviews?
• What will your analyzing strategy be?

Bibliographic List or Reference List

Before we want to get into the bottom of how can we write a bibliographic and reference list. Let’s understand a basic and minor difference between these two terms;

Bibliography Vs Reference!

Reference is when you have given the due credits to all the scholarly authors whose work and words you have used in your dissertation.

VS.

And the Bibliography is basically a list of all those references under one heading.

Now, there are certain ways and methods to style your citations:

• Harvard referencing (Parenthetical referencing)
• Chicago referencing
• Vancouver System
• APA style
• MLA style & few more

To enlighten yourself on each referencing style you can take help from dissertation, and you can get the detailed guide on how you can write your references or even get your references done.

How long should a dissertation proposal be?

In most universities a standard for a Masters level dissertation proposal consists of 3000 words and a PHD level dissertation proposal can be comprised of 5000 to 7000 words.

BUT! As long as you cover all the elements of dissertation proposal properly, you should have no trouble in setting limits to your proposal. Remember that scheme QUALITY OVER QUANITTY.

Congratulations!
You have made it to the end! Let’s just quickly sum up all the things we have discussed above;

Do’s & Don’ts of a dissertation research proposal