Assignment - Research Proposal
You are required to "Develop a preliminary Research Proposal". This assignment will involve the use of the material of your first assignment with a further/deeper review of the literature and industry reports. You will also need to include a research design providing some details based on the material you have learnt and read during the latter part of the semester.
In this assignment you should attempt to produce a single cohesive proposal for a piece of research. To achieve this you will typically need to adjust your initial questions, industry context and literature review to ensure one solid, focused purpose. Added to this, you now need to include your research design and methods.
Use this introductory section to help describe the industry, the problem and the need for the research. Usually one would use statistics, industry reports, and even prominent commentary by the media or politicians (although, I would usually avoid this). This section is what would typically be found as the introduction in a literature review of a research journal paper. You can title this section with a meaningful sub-heading. 'Introduction' or 'Background' are rather uninformative. Try something like 'Construction injuries and deaths', 'Poor productivity in housing construction', 'Affordability trends' or 'Energy crisis' etc... These titles really capture the readers attention and also give you, the writer, a focus for the section. Use this section to lead-up to the questions/s and justify them!
State your main research question (or AIM if you prefer) in bold, or indented font make it stand out as t is pivotal to the entire proposal. This is what the proposal is all about. Thereafter, list several sub-questions that you have developed to help answer the main question. These should ‘break-up' the main question into logical and manageable steps. You should have about 3 sub-questions. This sub-section need not only have the questions, but should also contain a paragraph or two to explain the questions and their derivation. Explain how your answering such questions will contribute to improving the industry.
Literature Review
Provide a literature review centred around your main research question. You should try to use sub-headings wherever possible to help you and the reader understand your flow of argument and thought. You may use text from both Assignments 1 and 2 as a basis for this section. This will not constitute self-plagiarism as this is a cumulative assessment. You would however be expected to extend and improve on previous submissions based on any feedback you received. Concentrate on a high quality review that may not cover all aspects of your topic, rather than try to cover all areas poorly.
Describe an appropriate Research Design for your research topic/question. Your design MUST seek to address the research question and your methods MUST be suitable to the research. You should try and describe it in technical terms using references wherever possible. If you are using secondary data, such a property database, describe the framework that will guide how you might achieve your research aim using the data. As part of your design you should also list and describe the data collection methods that you plan to employ with your chosen strategy. Use the terms and justifications presented to you in lectures. If you are using secondary data, such a property database, describe the type of data you plan to access, and the variables you expect to analyse. Also comment on the reliability of the data and its source. For other methods, you should include as much detail as possible about: types of questions, sample sizes, length, participants etc. Where possible use 2-3 methodology references or previous research literature to back-up your choice of design and methods.
What sustainability outcomes could be achieved if the building design processes incorporated a life cycle approach to the selection and implementation of building materials?
Attachment:- Sample Assignment and Example.rar