Research Proposal Writing Support

Most departments want the same spine under varying names. Funding applications add a budget and justification of resources; doctoral applications usually add a statement of fit with a named supervisor and their published work. Check your handbook before you draft — a department that asks for the theoretical framework as its own heading will mark down a proposal that buries it inside the literature review. Proposals attached to a longer project also need to survive contact with the final thesis structure, which is why they are worth writing alongside dissertation and thesis support rather than as a detached exercise.

Narrow on three axes — population, phenomenon and setting — then run the result through a question framework matched to your design. PICO (population, intervention, comparator, outcome) suits clinical and other comparative quantitative work; SPIDER (sample, phenomenon of interest, design, evaluation, research type) suits qualitative studies; SPICE fits an intervention sitting inside a service setting. Test whatever survives against the FINER criteria: feasible, interesting, novel, ethical, relevant. Feasibility is the criterion questions most often come unstuck on. A question requiring three years of longitudinal panel data is not a twelve-week dissertation, and coaching here usually means asking what data you can genuinely reach, then rebuilding the question around that answer.

A gap is a claim, and a claim needs evidence of a search. Record the databases you used (Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, ERIC, JSTOR or the business and law equivalents in your field), the Boolean strings and truncation, date limits, and your inclusion and exclusion criteria. A synthesis matrix — sources down the rows, themes, methods, samples and findings across the columns — makes the empty cell visible, and the empty cell is the gap. Review-shaped proposals should set out the planned search and screening against PRISMA-P (2015), the protocol-stage guideline; the flow diagram carrying actual screening counts belongs to the completed review, under PRISMA 2020. Building the matrix out of an annotated bibliography keeps the reasoning traceable when a supervisor asks where a claim came from.

Enough that a reader could run the study without asking you anything. State the philosophical position — positivist, interpretivist, critical realist, pragmatist — and let it drive the design rather than decorating it. Then give sampling strategy and size with justification, instruments and their provenance, procedure, and an analysis plan named at test level: not "statistical analysis" but ordinal logistic regression, or reflexive thematic analysis with a stated coding approach. Quantitative proposals should show an a priori power calculation, conventionally alpha of .05 and power of .80. Qualitative proposals should address credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability instead of borrowing validity language. Analysis routes can be rehearsed alongside SPSS support.

More than most drafts carry. Name your review route — an IRB operating under the Common Rule at 45 CFR 46 in the US; a university research ethics committee in the UK for non-NHS studies, but an NHS REC through the HRA where the study touches NHS patients, their tissue or identifiable data, while research recruiting NHS staff purely by virtue of their professional role normally needs the HRA governance assessment rather than NHS REC review; a university committee in Ireland and Germany; review against TCPS 2 in Canada; the NHMRC National Statement in Australia; and in the UAE an institutional committee plus the relevant health authority committee (MOHAP, DoH Abu Dhabi or DHA) for health research. Then write to that form's own headings. Cover recruitment and consent, the participant information sheet, withdrawal rights, foreseeable harm and your response if a disclosure occurs, any incentives, and data handling: where personal data lives, who can access it, retention period, and whether records are anonymised or pseudonymised. Studies involving EU participants need a stated GDPR lawful basis; UK studies need one under the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 — for university research normally public task, with a separate Article 9 condition for special category data.

No. Support here means the method explained, a worked example built on a parallel question that is not yours, structured feedback on a draft you wrote, and proofreading for clarity, tense, hedging and reference formatting. A model proposal is a labelled reference for comparison — how a stated gap is argued out of a documented search, how an analysis plan is named at test level — never a file for handing in. A typical session runs like this: you bring a question and a rough method, we identify what a committee or supervisor will challenge, and you rewrite. Where your institution requires disclosure of writing or proofreading support, follow its rule — expectations differ between a taught dissertation and a doctoral application. Send the draft question and your department's proposal brief, and we can point to what a reviewer is likely to push back on.