Make a Research Proposal for Ph.D Study
Some tips below are required to make a research proposal for your first step to enter the Ph.D journey.
First, writing a proposal is looks like you enter the room—a very big room—with many actors, researchers, methods, results, school of thought, and controversies. Your job is to show to the committee or potential supervisors that you are already familiar with the room. It is shown from your ability to indicate, for instance, the pioneer of the study, the prominent researchers, the recent/newly developed methods, the controversies, or contrary findings. You should put them in your proposal. Do a literature review to identify the works which have been done and the areas that should need further investigations.
Second, PhD journey must give a contribution to knowledge. Knowledge is like a balloon, always inflating with a larger surface than before. Hence, you need to be “on the surface of the balloon”. It can be shown by your ability to be among the first to apply a new method, new database, new approach, or interesting and contrary findings. Do a literature review to know your position among other researchers or studies. The more you read the literature, the more you know the development of your topic. It is always a possibility that your topic, based on your review of literature, is new and not massively discussed recently but in fact, already discussed a long time ago, gave no significant findings, and therefore not a sexy topic anymore for recent researchers.
Third, the PhD journey discusses one main topic with several main research questions. The main topic will be your dissertation title, or in the application form for the university or scholarship provider. While the main research questions will be the title of your thesis chapters or journal articles. For each main research question, you can have some research questions. If you want to make, for instance, three core chapters in your dissertation or three journal articles, then you need three main research questions. Therefore, for three main research questions, you need three different methods to solve them. A unique method for each main research question is better than replication.
Fourth, PhD journey is deep, narrow, but comprehensive. Therefore, the research questions should specific, precisely show the problems, and comprehensively discussed. The research questions also should simultaneously build a general understanding of the main topic above. Hence, the research questions should have a correlation from beginning to the end or a common thread—the element that ties them all together.
