Suggested reading for wk 1 session
Reflections
This is a generic guide by the University of Southampton about how to write a research proposal. It uses scientific method as it’s basis – and it is for the kind of research that I am used to reading about in medical journals. It is very different from the kinds of research that I was doing in my arts degree in that you need to describe your rationale and connection to existing literature much more explicitly.
At this stage, I have written a research proposal that uses this framework but suspect that as I start to find more information and test out my ideas that my research strategy may become much more like my research approach for my arts degree. I think that I like start with an idea but then to iterate out a solution in a more experimental way. In science, I think the question of reproducibility is important as this is a measure of how effective your method is and how easily it can be generalised or disseminated.
I hope that my project will generate some reproducible meaningful insights, but suspect that as it is emotion based – it will be very difficult to measure and standardise these insights. Also as the work is very much about exploring a complex relational state / feeling (intimacy) – trying to standardise the environment to allow for reproducible findings is not feasible with the resources and time that I have, and also would likely interfere with the feelings that the project is trying to generate.
So, again, I’m not sure if this kind of research proposal format is going to be best for my project – but it gives me a good strategy for how to think about gathering the right kind of knowledge to inform my thinking and of how to think about structuring a write up of the project.
References
Guidelines for preparing a Research Proposal. (n.d.). Available at: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/~assets/doc/writing-a-research-proposal-guidelines.pdf [Accessed 18 Mar. 2025].
