The first challenge of a research proposal is to establish a research question that is worth answering. Who decides if your question is worth answering? You are free to chose any question you like, however social science is a social enterprise. Ultimately, the people who decide are your readers, and more specifically, they are the experts within the research communities that your findings should matter to.
You must define your relevant research communities through the construction of your introduction and your literature review.
Which research communities will care? Who are the active researchers in your topic areas? These people will be your reviewers.
Establishing the basis for the importance of your study is inseparable from defining your scholarly audience. Your introduction and your review of literature must be animated by arguments that demonstrate the substantive, theoretical, and scholarly importance of your proposed work.
I have suggested three articles that argue effectively for the importance and relevance of their research topics:
1. Michael
Hechter, "From Class to Culture" Michael is a very skilled and disciplined writer. He is also a brilliant "crafter of arguments". I want you to read the first 5 pages of his paper (his abstract and intro). Obviously, his paper is much longer than your proposal can be. However, you need to read his intro and pay attention to what he does, and how he does it.
Your proposal needs to muster a stronger case for your research.
2. Andrew Papachristos, "
Murder by Structure". Papachristos is a young scholar, who writes well, but even more importantly, understands how to do "very good" research according to the standards of sociologists. Please read the introduction, but more importantly, pay attention to how he frames his research and how he tests his research questions.
How can your proposal provide a better test of your questions?
3. Derek Kreager, "
Strangers in the Halls". Kreager is probably the best young Criminologist/Sociologist in the US today. His work is especially good because he understands that research does not "stand alone". Research takes place in conversations with communities of scholars. Pay attention to how Kreager frames his work in relation to an active area of research and connects to real live researchers. This connection is missing, or drastically underdeveloped in your proposals right now. That is to be expected in new work, but, it needs to be fixed.
If you can't find an active community of scholars that surround your research area-- then you have to doubt whether the research you propose is worth doing.
All three articles are easily available online through JSTOR.
