Research Proposal Topic

[SHADOWFOX]

Hi Folks,

Been inactive recently because I am back in school and with a 16 month old daughter, work and school, I barely have any shop time recently. This post is not woodworking related but I know that we have a lot of experienced guys in the business field. I was wondering if I could get some advice on something. I need to put together a research proposal but I am drawing blanks on what topic to do my research proposal on. It's an open topic so it could be in business, leadership, technology, psychology, humanities.

Any advice on a good topic would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

[Mr__Bill]

Hear ya go, always glad to find something for others to do. This should fit several categories.

What decision making model will members of various social economic groups use to mitigate the impact of reduce disposable income resulting from the current economic situation?

How far must labor costs for tradesmen fall before homeowners find that DIY is no longer cost justifiable, and is this likely in the current economic situation?

Who will benefit the most from the crashed housing market?

Where the **** did the money the banks got go to?

[Tom Slick]

What aspects of business are you interested in? how "big" is your research supposed to be?

Here are some projects that are going on in my "senior projects" group. At my school all students are required to complete a research project applicable to their major before they can graduate.
What LEED certification really means.
Developing various small business models.
Developing a safety program (ISO 9001/16000) for a small municipality
Applications of "Lean" manufacturing
Product life cycles
Evaluation of business expansion and new equipment purchases.

I am currently working on a research project that examines manual assembly performance (putting stuff together) and how it correlates to a person's learning style and the instructional style that was given. The idea being everyone learns differently and everyone follows directions differently when putting stuff together. After running an experiment what conclusions can I draw. The application being work instructions, maintenance manuals, etc.

I hope any of this helps

[poolhound]

Chris,

I am happy to be a resource for you. You mentioned quite a diverse set of potential topic areas. As Tom asked what areas do you find more interesting personally? If you pick one that is closest to what you like and ponders questions that you want the answers to the finished product will be that much better and your personal enthusiasum will shine through.

Do you have any guidlines for this research project? Some topics may have limited scope, some too board. Do you know on what basis this project will be graded, your research skills, the findings, the topic, relevance ... ?

If you can provide some guidance I could easily come up with a few topics but it may be counterproductive to just randomly throw some out without direction. I may even have certain existing materials you could use

[LCHIEN]

Are you doing the research proposal and eventually will be doing the research, or just doing a proposal to get experience doing that?

[Alex Franke]

Here's a cutting edge topic that touches on a few of the topics you mentioned: How are serious games used in business? How can they be effective? (e.g. IBM's Innov8, which actually came out of our b-school .)

[pierhogunn]

1. What is the peter principle
2. How do you mitigate it
3. How much of our economic crisis can be explained by this principle?

[crokett]

Something I deal with every day at work - are the technological systems we are building growing too complex to be effectively managed? IMO, for some organizations, yes they are.

[SHADOWFOX]

Are you doing the research proposal and eventually will be doing the research, or just doing a proposal to get experience doing that?

I just need to do a research proposal but will not be doing the research. My professor said that students can choose any topic. The objective of the course was for students to learn how to properly put together a research proposal. The students cannot use non-scholarly articles. Our school online library has a bunch of great databases ABI/Inform, Pro-Quest, etc. so there is no shortage on scholarly literature, journals and researches to cite. I can also borrow books from the Illinois library consortium so no problem if I need to borrow books to use. I just need to decide on the topic (not too narrow or not too broad)

The reason why I wanted to stay away from science topic is because my professor is a Paleontologist and has a Ph.D (Illini Alumni) and I have heard from his previous students that he tend to be more critical when it comes to those topics.

Very great topic suggestions! Thank you so much for providing me some great ideas for the research proposal. I've never done a scholarly research proposal before and I am enjoying this class along with other classes that I am taking.

My problem is I have a tendency to over think things so much that it sometimes hinders me from getting started. lol

Kind regards,