Quantitative Mini-Proposal
Assignment Description
As a counselor, you will regularly use professional literature to inform your work. Many of the important questions that you will have as your career evolves will be answered by researchers conducting quantitative studies. The quantitative designs help generate the knowledge base that becomes the evidence behind our best practices.
For this assignment, you will create a mini-research proposal for a quantitative study. As you work through the units relevant to quantitative research concepts, think through a possible quantitative study. Your work on this assignment will demonstrate that you understand the importance of the alignment of the elements of a study and how they work together.
Assignment Instructions and Grading Criteria
In preparation for this assignment, think about a problem in counseling practice that could be researched using a quantitative approach. Create a mini research proposal that addresses the problem that you identified. Your proposal must include the elements listed below the numbered grading so be sure to address each point. You may also want to review the performance level descriptions for each criterion in the Quantitative Mini-Proposal Scoring Guide to see how your work will be assessed:
Synthesize scholarly literature that supports the study of a research problem.
Write a mini literature review of three recent empirical sources (required) and one non-empirical source (optional).
Create quantitative research questions that are aligned to a research problem.
This specific question should be written in a way that it could be answered through quantitative data; this is the main question that will be answered by the proposed study. Identify any independent and dependent variables.
Identify research designs for quantitative studies.
Identify the research design for the proposed study.
Choose from correlational, experimental, quasi-experimental, time-series, and survey.
Provide a rationale as to why this particular design is a good fit for your study.
Employ appropriate sampling strategies for quantitative studies.
In a sampling plan describe your proposed sampling strategy, including the population from which the sample would come and how many participants you would include.
Plan data collection strategies and sources that address a research question.
Identify data collection strategies that you would use in your study and describe any instruments that you would use.
Explain how you would collect the quantitative data that would answer your research question.
Plan quantitative data analysis strategies.
Explain how you would analyze the data that you collected based upon your research question and type of data that will be collected.
Identify ethical and cultural concerns in quantitative studies.
Identify at least one ethical and at least one cultural concern that may be present in the proposed study.
Describe how mixed methods might be applied to address research problems.
Describe how the problem that you investigated might be addressed by using a mixed-methods approach.
Explain whether you believe that would be a stronger approach or not, in this particular situation.
Communicate effectively in appropriate form and style, using APA guidelines for grammar, punctuation, and mechanics.
