Your proposal should be written in a APA style and should be set up like an APA style research report. You should use the same APA format that you used in writing your Project 1 paper. Please use the sample paper on pp. 537 - 557 of the text as a guide to the appropriate format for this paper. However, unlike a research report which describes a study that was already carried out, in a research proposal you will be discussing a project that has been planned, but not carried out. Therefore, the research proposal should be written in future tense. The research proposal will contain the same sections as found in a research report, but the content presented will be somewhat different. Your proposal should include the following sections: • An Abstract, summarizing the proposed research. Like an Abstract in a research report, this section should include information from all the main sections of the paper. The Abstract should be brief ( about 100- 120 words) and should contain only the information necessary to allow a reader to determine the nature of the proposed research. • An Introduction, reviewing the psychological literature on the problem addressed by the proposed research. This part of the paper should be well developed. It should include a literature review of 7 - 10 articles on the topic that you are investigating. This discussion should help the reader understand the general findings in this area of research and more specifically, what research has been done on the topic you wish to study. The Introduction should provide background on the problem addressed by the research proposal. =You should include a discuss of any theory that has been used to explain prior findings. Please make sure you understand how to cite in text sources in an APA style report. You should have read the article that you cite and be able to describe the findings and implications of those that are most related to your proposal If you are citing the results of a study that you did not read, but was included in the discussion of another article that you did read you may cite this article by using the appropriate in text citation . This is called citing an indirect source. Please see how this and other in text citations are formatted in an APA report at the Purdue University OWL website-In Text Citations Author/Authors.. Remember that only the sources you have read should be cited in the References. Any indirect citation listed in the Introduction should have a reference to the article where you found the information that you cite indirectly. If you wish to include quoted material from your sources please make sure that you know how to format these quotations in APA style. Pleaes check the examples shown at the Purdue University OWL website- In-Text Citations The Basics.. Please make every effort to avoid plagiarism when writing these papers. Please see the plagiarism section of our course outline/syllabus to see Mercy`s policy on plagiarism. The Introduction should also provide a rationale for the proposed research. It should help the reader see how the proposed research will help us better understand the problem being addressed. There should be a clear statement of the problem and a statement of the the research hypothesis/hypotheses of the study. In a proposal, the Introduction should be a sustantial part of the report. Your discussion of the articles you have read needs to indicate an understanding of these articles and how they relate to your proposed . • A Method section, describing the research participants and the materials required for the proposed study, and detailing the procedure that would be used to conduct the proposed study. The Method should be made up of three subsections: Participants, Materials and Procedure. Each section should be well detailed. This is the meat of the research proposal. You should explain what participants will be used, how they will be recruited and how they will be assigned to any experimental conditions. Any informed consent documents, or letters of permission needed for the study should be added as appendices to the proposal. If your proposal involves working with children you will need a form for parental informed consent as well as an assent form for the child. These materials should appear in an appendix placed after the References. You should describe any materials that will be used in running the study. If you decide to use a survey or questionnaire that you develop, you should add an appendix to the paper showing the actual questionnaire or survey. If you are going to use a questionnaire or survey that is available from a publisher or from the literature, be sure to cite the source of your instrument in the Materials section of the report. If you use any equipment, be sure to describe it and include the manufacturer and model number for the equipment. If you plan to devise your own equipment or materials, be sure they are described in detail in this section. In the Procedure section, be sure to describe in detail, the procedure that will be used for each research participant. If there are several conditions used in the study, please explain the procedures used for participants in each condition in the study. Remember, the goal of the Method section is to provide enough detail so that another researcher would be able to replicate your study, based on the information given in this section of the paper. Writing clearly is always important, but especially important in this part of the paper. My advice is to make this section so clear that your grandmother (i.e. someone totally unfamiliar with psychology) would be able to understand it. It is a good idea to have someone totally unfamiliar with your project read the proposal and see if they are able to understand what you have planned. Like the Introduction, in a proposal, the Method should be a substandial part of the paper, providing enough detail for the reader to understand the research design and procedure that you would use if you were actually carrying out the proposed study. • A Results section, describing the plan for analyzing the data that would be collected in the proposed study. Unlike a research report, in a proposal you do not have any results to report. However, you can describe your plan for analyzing the data. To do so, you will have to think of the statistical analysis that will be most appropriate for your study and describe your plan for the data analysis in this section. • A Discussion section, explaining possible interpretations of the potential research findings. Again, you will not have actual findings to discuss in the proposal. However, you can tell me what the implications are for the possible findings of the study. For example, if you plan a hypothesis test for your data analysis, and if the test findings are significant, these findings have implications for the variables being studied. If the test results are not significant, there are different implications for the variables being studied. Discuss the different possible findings for your study in light of past research and theory on your research problem. Discuss what the different findings suggest about the variables that are being studied and about the psychological processes that are related to these variables. • A listing of the References cited in the proposal. Please make sure that any article that is discussed in your paper has a correponding citation in the References. In addition, please make sure that your citations conform to APA style, as shown in the sample manuscript in the text. Any appendices should follow the References and should be labeled sequentially be letters of the alphabet (i.e. Appendix A, Appendix B, etc). An appendix should have a title page, followed by the appropriate material on subsequent pages. Possible appendices for your proposal might include informed consent forms and questionnaires or surveys to be used in the proposed research. I hope this information makes the structure of the research proposal clearer. Please let me know if you have any questions about your proposal. I will open a folder for discussing questions about the research proposal in the Discussion area of the class.