COMM 317: Research proposals due March 20

Instead of a midterm exam, I am assigning you to write a research proposal. It should be at least 750 words in length, and it is due at the beginning of class Tuesday, March 20. In this proposal, you will address two questions:

What is your topic, and what do you plan to say about it?

How are you going to research the topic?

There are more tips on how to do a proposal for my classes on my SCI/Benedictine faculty page. Since COMM 317 is an upper-division course, you should incorporate some of the standard headings into your research proposal.

The headings are explained clearly in a "Beginners' Guide to the Research Proposal" prepared by the Centre for Advancement of Health at Canada's Calgary University. While Calgary's guide is specific to health sciences, the basic scientific method behind it is the same in the field of communications, the social sciences and much research in the humanities. For COMM 317, your proposal should at minimum address these headings:

1. Title and research question. What are you going to write about, and what are you going to say about it? In other words, what's your working hypothesis? As you read the Calgary guide, pay particular attention to the checklists on quality of the proposal and presentation, the study rationale, the problem (or purpose) and working hypotheses. They'll give you ideas and help you think through your study.

2. Method. How are you going to go about doing your paper? Read the two seconds sections on methodology in the Calgary guide. They address questions of experimental design and statistical analysis more often encountered in the sciences, but the discussion will help you think through the research design of your project. What is your hypotehesis? How will you test it? What are your variables?

For most of you, the project will be descriptive and the research method will involve tracking down court cases -- and news coverage that explains the cases -- on the Internet and in the library. You will take some principle of law and/or ethics and study how it is carried out in practice -- or how it was carried out in some real-world case.

For example, you might want to do a paper on the degree to which gangsta rap is protected speech under the First Amendment. After reading up on the subject a little, I would consult the University of Calgary guide and figure out some tentative research objectives, purpose and hypothesis. I might, for example, say that even though some of it is pretty exuberant, rap music doesn't present a clear and present danger to society and some of it offers criticism of society that is specifically upheld under the First Amendment. I would do a preliminary literature review, mentioning specific articles and court cases. That would get me through Part 1, the statement of title, hypothesis and so on.

Then I would consult Parts 2-3 of the Calgary guide on method. Since my paper would be based mostly on researching articles and court cases, I wouldn't have to worry as much about things like statistics, experimental design and so on. But I would want to think about some of the possible intervening variables -- for example, is race a factor in the public reaction to gangsta rap? Is the attitude toward women sometimes expressed in the lyrics a factor? Does the music incite violence? Even though I'm not doing a laboratory experiement, in other words, I would want to use the scientific method to think through the topic and make sure I'm not lumping apples and oranges together.

In class Tuesday (Feb. 27), we will choose topics and begin to think through some of the research design issues. That will occupy the second half of the period. I will post some questions about the first half, the page and cases on prior restraint on the Doug Linder website, later tonight. Stay tuned.