Regardless of your research issue and the chosen methodology, all dissertation proposals should be designed in a way that addresses each of the following three questions:
- What does the research study intend to accomplish? Your dissertation proposal should be brief, concise, and clear in defining a researchable nursing problem.
- Is this topic or research problem worthy of study? It would be best to tell the audience why you want or plan to proceed with the study. A literature review is handy here because it allows you to detail convincing evidence from previous studies that justifies the need to investigate, examine, assess, or evaluate the proposed research topic. In other words, you should be well-position to present a perfect response to the “So what?” question.
- How will you conduct the proposed study, and does it align with existing research standards and principles? You need to identify and describe the chosen research design in detail.
It is now time to provide a skeleton view of a dissertation proposal, acknowledging the importance of answering these questions as correctly as possible. Specifically, your research proposal for a fast-approaching nursing dissertation assignment should include the following sections:
Introduction
While some nursing students view their nursing dissertation proposals as mere course assignments, we encourage you to approach them seriously. In particular, treat the dissertation introduction as a special section for making that decisive pitch for immediate approval by your faculty. The introductory paragraph demonstrates the significance of making a comprehensive research inquiry on the chosen nursing problem.
Therefore, Nursing Writing Help recommends that you should consider your proposal’s introduction as a short narrative that precisely answers the following questions:
- What is the proposed dissertation’s central problem?
- What is the relevant nursing field for this core nursing issue?
- What methods are suitable for collecting and analyzing data on the research problem?
- Why is this study of great importance today?
- Will the study’s outcome be important to the academe or the world?
- Why should the dissertation proposal’s audience or readers be concerned about the proposed study’s results?
- Background Information & Significance
As the title suggests, this part allows you to explain the research proposal’s context. Nursing students in their final years should also utilize this stage to describe the proposed dissertation proposal’s importance clearly. Notably, most academic writers do not include this section in their research proposals or integrate it in the introduction. Although you are free to omit “background information and significance” because it is inextricably linked to the introductory paragraph, we always urge our dissertation professionals to write to include it as a separate step to ensure the dissertation proposal’s smooth flow.
Separately writing this segment goes a long way to give your readers the gist about the research problem and why approving the study matters. Our custom research proposal writing service does just that by providing a concise paragraph or two to elicit and maintain the readers’ interest in the proposed nursing research study.
Review of Literature
The research proposal approval panel expects you to provide an evidence-based review of extant studies on the proposed nursing research issue in this section. The literature review, assessment, and synthesis must be deliberate and well-crafted. An effective review of previous research situates the study topic within a broader academic context and scheme of near – and similar topics under empirical investigation. In addition, the reviewed literature shows the proposed dissertation’s originality or uniqueness.
Your literature review part should carry heavy information because it involves identifying relevant sources, primarily recent peer-reviewed nursing articles, in-text citing them, and critiquing their findings. The professor expects you to smartly structure to increase the reader’s chances of spotting and comprehending the major agreements and contentions underlying your dissertation proposal vis-à-vis other scholars. In this respect, one widely recommended way to properly organize a research proposal’s literature review is to separate the reviewed studies into major themes. Unlike chronologically describing previous research one after another, grouping them into themes is more effective because it makes the proposal interesting and persuasive.
The literature review part should end with a statement recognizing a research gap that your proposed study plans to bridge by contributing new knowledge to your nursing field.
Aims/Goals & Research Questions
After determining the proposed study’s good angle, it is time to develop and present its aims or goals, general and specific objectives, and research questions. At Nursing Writing Help, we highly recommend nursing students carefully frame and consider stating their objectives and questions in single sentences. For example, you should be concise and clear in asking the following and other relevant research questions:
- What does the research study intend to accomplish?
- Is this topic or research problem worthy of study? It would help if you told the audience why you want or plan to proceed with the study.
- How will you conduct the proposed study, and does it align with existing research standards and principles?
- Research Design & Methodology
As much as a nursing proposal is not the actual nursing dissertation research, it would be best if you organized this section logically to create the much-needed confidence in your readers. The audience wants to know whether the research problem is worth pursuing in a comprehensive study. In other words, you must select an appropriate research design, identify and describe analytical strategies to address the research issue, and briefly explain the data collection, measurement, analysis, and presentation techniques. Note that your research design and qualitative or quantitative methods should align with the research objectives and questions.