Pointers for Research Proposal:
Your proposed research should bear on issues pertaining to crime and criminal justice, broadly understood. This would include research into the causes of crime, the predictors of attitudes or opinions about crime and criminal Justice held by members of the public, the predictors of outcomes at various stages of the criminal justice process (e.g., arrest vs. no arrest, conviction vs. acquittal, etc.), or the social factors responsible for the development and operation of alternatives to the standard criminal justice system (e.g., drug rehab programs, anger management therapy, etc).
You should choose a topic for your proposal that really interests you..
The project you propose should be practical and realistic. It should be a project that you could actually do with the resources available to you. So, no research that would be expensive to conduct, require very large sample sizes, involve access to people and places off limits to you, call for fluency in a language you do not speak, necessitate long-distance travel, etc.
Every proposed project needs to include at least one dependent variable (something you are trying to explain), one or more independent variables (things you think can help explain the dependent variable), one or more clearly-stated hypotheses, and a method through which data will be gathered. I strongly encourage people to select one research method for their proposed research rather than propose multi-method studies.
The choice of methods includes questionnaires and interviews, but also ethnographic research (where people study groups to which they belong through participant observation), direct observation (where people watch and listen to the behavior of others that is observable to them without any interaction), content analysis (where a sample of items with written, oral, or visual content, like films, news broadcasts, or novels, is studied for patterns and associations with social factors), and cross-cultural research (in which a sample of diverse societies is examined for similarities and differences and principles that can explain them. Please consider all possible research methods before deciding on the one you will propose
This statement only needs to be a paragraph or two in length. It should, however, include the following:
what your dependent variable will be (i.e., what your research will try to explain);
what your independent variable(s) will be (I.e., what social factor or factors you think can explain your dependent variable, and that you will include in your proposed study;
what hypothesis or hypotheses you will be testing in your proposed research; and
how and where you will propose gathering your data.
You should plan to propose using just one method in your study, as opposed to multiple methods, since this will lead to a more manageable plan and will simplify preparing the proposal.
Many of you will propose using anonymous questionnaires in your research, which is great, but you do not have to do that. Other methods to consider include face-to-face interviews; direct observation, where you watch events unfold but do not participate in them; content analysis, where you record information from a sample of films, novels, news broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, or song lyrics; cross-cultural research, where you select a sample of diverse cultures and use written material about them to retrieve information in which you are interested; and participant observation — the “ethnographic method” — in which you observe behavior and interact with people in a group to which you yourself belong.
This is the first part. I will use you as the writer for the research paper as well.