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Proposal Writing—A Remedy for a Missing Part of Graduate Training

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2002

Stephen L. Wasby
Stephen L. Wasby
Affiliation:
Professor of political science emeritus at the University at Albany–SUNY. During 1978–1979, he served as director of the Law and Social Sciences Program at the National Science Foundation, where his thinking for this article began. His research and writing is in the area of public law, focusing on the federal appellate courts. He is a member of the editorial boards of Justice System Journal and Western Legal History. His last article for PS was “Crosscutting the Subfields: Learning from our Colleagues” (December 1997).
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Extract

Background

The Nature of the Problem. Some years ago, when I had the privilege of serving as a program director at the National Science Foundation, the proposals I read left me with a distinct impression: many researchers presented exciting research ideas, but in a high proportion of cases the exciting ideas were embedded in horrendously constructed proposals. In relatively few cases were the proposals well constructed, with important elements missing or underdeveloped. One would often find, for example, after a clear initial statement of the research problem and an effectively executed literature review, a thin or nonexistent research design or, without transition, a statement of the statistics to be used. Hypotheses, where present, were often not derived from the discussed literature, or from any literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , June 2001 , pp. 309 - 312
Copyright
© 2001 by the American Political Science Association

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