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ISYS3015 Analytical Methods for IS professionals 2004

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Preparing a research proposal


(Individual assignment)
Introduction

A research proposal is a document that presents a plan for a project to reviewers for
evaluation. It can be a supervised project submitted to instructors as part of an educational
degree or it can be a research project proposed to a funding agency. Its purpose is to
convince reviewers that you, the researcher, are capable of successfully conducting the
proposed research project. Reviewers have more confidence that a planned project will be
successfully completed if the proposal is well written and organized, and if you demonstrate
careful planning.

A proposal describes the research problem and its importance and gives a detailed account
of the methods that will be used to anser the questionand why they are appropriate. The
objective of this assignment is for you to practice the skills of writing a well-structured
research proposal. This is an important skill you need to grasp first to finish your degree and
then to be successful in your future work.

You will follow similar steps regardless of whether you are writing a quantitative or a
qualitative research proposal. In practice, the quantitative research proposal is more
structured and has more concrete content than a qualitative proposal does. The reason is
that the qualitative research process itself is less structured and preplanned. This makes
proposals for qualitative research more difficult to write than quantitative research proposals.
In this assignment, you can write either qualitative or quantitative proposal depends on the
nature of your proposed research1.

This assignment is divided into two stages. In week 5, you need to submit the first half of
your research proposal, which includes the problem statements and the literature review. In
week 8, you need to submit a complete research proposal, which includes a revised problem
statement and literature review as well as a research design part. Each stage will be marked
out of 15 and your final mark for assignment 1 will be the average of the two. Below is a
detailed description of what you need to do in each stage.

Stage 1 Problem statement and literature review (due on week 5)


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Good research starts from a good problem, so does a good research proposal. The research
problem does not come from void, there should be sufficient background information for a
reviewer of your proposal to make initial judgment of the motivation of your research. In
another words, you should convince the reviewers that the problem you propose to solve is a
real one and is currently being faced by some industry or is hampering the advance or
adoption of some technology (this shows the importance of your research)

1
Big projects usually involve both qualitative and quantitative parts. However it is not a requirement
for this assignment.

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ISYS3015 Analytical Methods for IS professionals 2004
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There are many ways for you to identify a suitable research problem2. To save you the effort
of trying all sorts of approaches in all different areas, we first restrict your research area to
mobile commerce then provide you a set of readings, most of which are short research
reports in mobile commerce. You can either repeat or extend one of those research projects
and make it your own project for the purpose of this assignment. Creativeness is not an
assessment criterion for this assignment.

What you should include in this section are:

1. Statement of the problem and subproblems. Please use the checklist in page 56 of
textbook to check the appropriateness of your statement of the problem.
2. Write your hypotheses or questions
3. Write the delimitations, the specific things that your own research will not address
4. Write the definitions of terms
5. Write the assumptions
6. Describe the importance of the study (background and motivation)

For a detailed guideline and a sample research proposal please read the textbook page 63-
66.
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Reviewing the accumulated knowledge about a question is an essential early step in the
research process, no matter which approach you adopt. In this section, you are required to
review at least 5 papers other than those we give you and at least 4 of them should be peer-
reviewedresearch papers. The rest could be technical reports, newspaper articles or online
articles. Please note that most papers have a list of references at the end, it is fine for you to
review some papers from the references. However, it is not acceptable for you to copy what
the authors said about a referenced paper. You should find the original paper, read it and
make your own comments in the literature review.

Bear in your mind while you are doing literature review that we don’t merely report the
related literature, we should evaluate, organize and synthesize what others have done. You
should also emphasize that the literature you are discussing is closely related with your
problem. For some research areas, for instance “mobile commerce”, there is a huge amount
of information you can find regarding this general area. Not everything you find is closely
related the specific problem you are trying to solve in this project. For instance, if your
purpose is to “understand the mobile handheld device use and adoption”, in general sense a
technique report which talks about the difference between wi-fi and Bluetooth would only be
considered remotely connected to that purpose. You will lose credit if you cannot justify the
relatedness of that paper. Therefore the first thing in a literature review is for you to devise
an effective searching strategy to locate the most relevant papers3.

For a detailed guideline and a sample literature review please read the textbook page 84-89.
You can also find sample literature reviews from most research papers.
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2
Please refer to the lecture notes on March 19th.
3
Use what you learnt in the lecture and follow the guidelines located at
http://www.library.usyd.edu.au/subjects/infotech/. See section Notes for ISYS3015 for guidelines and
Powerpoint for ISYS3015 for lecture slides.

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ISYS3015 Analytical Methods for IS professionals 2004
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For each papers or articles you reviewed you should include them in the references part.
You can find guidelines for citations and reference list in textbook Pg 294-296 and Week 3’s
lecture notes.

Below is a brief guide for the citation and references format you should use for this
assignment4:

1. Order the references according to the first author’s surname


2. Detailed format of a single reference item
a. Journal papers
i. Basic format:
Sequence number. Author(s).Title. Magazine or Journal Title, Volume
(issue, if given), paging.
ii. Example:
1. Sarker S. and Wells J. Understanding mobile handheld device
use and adoption. Commun. ACM 46, 12 (Dec. 2004), 35-40
b. Conference papers
i. Basic format:
Sequence number. Author(s). Title. In Proceedings title (place and year)
ii. Example
2. Stewart K and Zhang Y. Effects of hypertext links on trust
transfer. In Proceedings of the 5th international conference on
Electronic commerce (Pitttsburgh, PA, 2003)

c. Online document
i. Basic format:
Sequence number. Author(s). Title. [Online magazine title if not in an
online publication use “WWW document” instead]. URL the URL of the
document.

ii. Examples
3. Worthen B. Wireless finally connects, [CIO Magazine, Feb. 1,
2004 issue]. URL
http://www.cio.com/archive/020104/wireless.html5
4. Land, T Web Extension to American Psychological Association
Style (WEAPAS) [WWW document]. URL
http://www.beadsland.com/weapas/

d. Newspaper articles
i. Basic format:
Sequence number. Author(s).Title. Name of Newspaper. Date
ii. Example:
5. Cohen R. Wi-fi fairness, New York Times Magazine, Feb 8,
2004.
3. Citation guide: use the sequence number when you need to cite a paper. For
instance: “The fact that consumers shop in diverse contexts requires special attention
[3]. “ Here we tell the readers that the preceding argument “consumers shop in
diverse contexts requires special attention” is taken from reference 3 which is the
paper, Wireless finally connects by Worthen B. in CIO Magazine, Feb. 1, 2004 issue

4
For a detailed guide please read Land, T Web Extension to American Psychological Association Style
(WEAPAS) [WWW document]. URL http://www.beadsland.com/weapas/
5
If the URL is too long and it is very easy to locate the article given the online magazine title and
issue number, you can omit the URL part

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In the appendix part, please including the followings:
1. Give the reference of the paper you have chosen to repeat or extend the study
reported
2. Give an answer to question 4 and 5 in the checklist on page 67 of the textbook.
3. Give a brief description of your search strategies and whether it is successful or not.

Stage 2 a complete research proposal


(due on week 8) Instructions not ready at this moment, please wait for further notice.

Formatting requirements
1. Format of your proposal
a) Don’t forget to give a title to your project
b) Please refer to the general format in page 126 of textbook.
c) It is your choice whether or not to give a separate heading to different
contents under one section. If you would like to make separate headings
under one section, say, under the problem and its setting, you should give a
number to those headings in the following form:
1. Introduction (or The problem and its setting)
1.1 Background
1.2 Research problem
1.3 The delimitations
1.4 The definition of terms
1.5 The assumptions
….
2. Your report should be laid out clearly with headings, page numbers, and a font which
is easy to read and with clearly defined paragraphs page numbers. Pay attention to
how your sentences and paragraphs are constructed, your spelling and your
punctuation
3. Please print out your proposal along with a separate cover page with the following
information:
a) Your name and ID
b) Course ID and name
c) Assignment number, name and date of submission
d) Tutorial time and your tutor’s name
4. Word limit: 800 – 1200 words

Readings
1. Sarker S. and Wells J. Understanding mobile handheld device use and adoption.
Commun. ACM 46, 12 (Dec. 2003), 35-40
2. Jarvenpaa S et. al. Mobile commerce at crossroads. Commun. ACM 46, 12 (Dec.
2003), 41-44
3. Lee Y and Benbasat I. Interface design for mobile commerce. Commun. ACM 46, 12
(Dec. 2003), 49-52
4. Tatar D. et. al. Handhelds go to school: lessons learned. IEEE Computer 36, 9 (Sep.
2003), 30-37

Appendix
1. submission: before 10 am Thursday, April 8th, 2004 (week 5) to the locked box
marked ISYS3015 Assignment 1 on the ground floor of Madsen outside room G65.
2. See attached marking guide for assignment 1 stage 1

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ISYS3015 Analytical Methods for IS professionals 2004
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Marking guide for assignment 1 stage 1

Student Name ________________________

Student ID ___________________________ Tutorial class ________________________

Excellent Good Satisfactory Poor Unsatisfactory


Problem and its settings 6 4 2 1 0
Literature review 5 4 3 2 0
Written presentation 4 3 2 1 0
Total

Problem and its settings:


Excellent: All parts are present.
The problem is researchable and stated in a complete, grammatical
sentence.
The division of subroblems is reasonable
Subproblems are clearly stated
Hypotheses are testable or questions are reasonable
All terms have (operational) definitions
The definitions are clear
The delimitations are reasonable and clear
The assumptions are reasonable and clear
There is sufficient background information.
The research is well motivated and updated.
Answers to question 4 is satisfactory
Have at least two peers reviewed your proposal and have recorded
their opinions.
Good: one or two aspects are less satisfactory
Satsifactory: three or four aspects are less satisfactory
Poor: more than four less satisfactory aspects
Unsatisfactory: only one or two parts make sense

Literature review
Excellent: There are 4 or more research papers reviewed
All of them are closely related with the problem at hand
Papers are not restricted to the references of given papers
Critical review of all papers (good summary)
Good organization of the literatures (ie. put into different categories)
Use correct citation and reference format
Have reported your search strategy
Good: one aspect is less satisfactory
Satisfactory: two aspects are less satisfactory
Poor: three aspects are less satisfactory
Unsatisfactory: more than three aspects are not satisfactory
Written presentation
Excellent: No errors, publishable standard
Good: little or no grammatical errors
The content flows logically through the whole document
Satisfactory: a few grammatical errors
The content flows logically through the whole document
Unsatisfactory: lots of grammatical errors or poor logical structure
Poor: lots of grammatical errors and poor logical structure

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