A proposal is a promise you have to be able to keep
Committees reject proposals for a small number of recurring reasons, and almost all of them are visible before submission. The question is too broad, the design cannot answer it, or the timeline assumes nothing goes wrong. All three are fixable now and expensive later.
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Most proposal problems are question problems in disguise
A question that is too broad cannot be answered by any feasible study, so the design looks inadequate no matter how well it is written. A question that is not really a question, which usually means it describes a topic rather than asking something, gives the design nothing to be adequate for.
The test is whether someone could tell you were wrong. A researchable question has a possible answer you have not already assumed, and it names what you would look at to find it. How does social media affect students is a topic. Whether daily platform use predicts self-reported sleep quality in first-year undergraduates is a question.
Once the question is right, the design usually follows quickly, because the question itself rules most options out. That is why this is worth getting right before writing anything else.
- A question narrow enough to answer and worth answering
- A design that visibly follows from it
- A literature review scoped to justify the study, not to cover the field
- A timeline with recruitment and approval delays built in
What a review covers
Read against your program's proposal requirements
- Whether the question is researchable as written
- Whether the design can actually produce an answer to it
- Feasibility: access, recruitment, time and skills you will need
- Whether the literature section justifies this study specifically
- The objections your committee is most likely to raise
Four recurring rejections
Scope too broad
The most common single reason. A doctoral study answers one question well. Proposals that promise to examine a phenomenon comprehensively are promising something no study delivers.
Design and question misaligned
A question about why people do something, answered with a survey that can only establish how many do. The mismatch is usually invisible to the author and obvious to a reader.
Feasibility not addressed
No account of how you will reach the population, whether you have access, or what happens if recruitment is slow. Committees have watched this fail before and they look for it.
A literature review of everything
Proposal literature sections justify this study. A full field review belongs in chapter two later, and putting it in the proposal usually buries the argument for your own work.
From draft to approval
Send the draft and your program's requirements
Proposal formats vary a lot between programs, including whether a full literature review is expected. Being graded against the wrong template is a common and avoidable rejection.
Test the question first
Before anything else, whether it is answerable and whether the design answers it. If the question needs narrowing, everything downstream changes, so this cannot come second.
Feasibility, honestly
Access, recruitment, instruments, skills and timeline. We will tell you if we think a plan is optimistic, because a committee will, and it is better to hear it now.
Anticipate the objections
A written list of what your committee is likely to challenge, so you can address it in the text rather than in the meeting.
You revise, we reread
As many rounds as it needs. Proposal work is usually short and worth a great deal, because a change here saves months later.
It is your study, and it has to be
- We do not write your proposal or any section of it.
- We do not design your study and hand it to you.
- We do not choose your research question for you.
- We do not complete your IRB or ethics application.
- We read what you wrote, test whether it holds, and tell you what a committee will say.
A study designed by someone else becomes unworkable at the point you have to run it and defend it. Helping you think it through is useful. Handing you a design is not. Read the full policy.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends entirely on your program, from a short document to something close to the first three chapters. Your handbook is the authority, and getting this wrong is a surprisingly common cause of a returned proposal.
Three tests. Can you say what evidence would answer it? Could the answer turn out to be something other than what you expect? And can you actually get that evidence in the time you have? A question that fails any of these will produce a difficult study.
Read the feedback for the underlying objection rather than the surface comments. Several comments about the literature review often mean the committee is not convinced the study is justified, which is a question problem rather than a writing problem. Fixing the surface leaves the real objection in place.
Usually yes, with your committee's agreement, and small refinements are normal. Substantial changes may need re-approval and may affect your ethics clearance. Tell your supervisor early rather than presenting a changed study later.
Enough to establish that the question matters and has not been answered. That is a different job from the full review in chapter two. If a paragraph is not helping justify your study, it usually belongs in the later chapter instead.
The proposal, generally, because the IRB application depends on a settled design. Look at the IRB form early though, since it often asks questions your proposal should already answer, and it can reveal gaps while they are still cheap to fix.
Send the proposal and your program's requirements
We will tell you whether the question is answerable, whether the design answers it, and what your committee is most likely to push back on.
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