The Pre-Proposal

The intent behind this assignment is for you to demonstrate mastery of the course learning goals, especially your understanding of qualitative and quantitative research found in the literature which is used to address issues within the counseling discipline. Since each of you face unique situations in your professional work, and likely hold different academic and professional goals, you may research a topic of your choosing within the discipline of counseling.

For this assignment, you will develop an original research pre-proposal. A research pre-proposal is a concise description of a research project created to gain approval either from funding sources or academic officers before they begin more in-depth work on a research project. If their pre-proposal is acceptable, they write a full research proposal, which typically consists of the first three chapters of a dissertation. Writing an effective research pre-proposal will demonstrate your knowledge of basic research concepts and your ability to apply the existing literature to the field of counseling. Please see The Pre-Proposal Annotated Template for more information.

Choose a specific research site so your research pre-proposal will be as realistic as possible. If the site you have in mind actually exists, use a pseudonym to avoid any ethical breaches. For example, if the research site you have in mind is a counseling clinic, you could refer to it as Clinic XYZ. If your research site is a university, you could call it University XYZ.

Use the annotated template to guide the writing of your paper. In the paper, you will:

• Explain the significance of a research problem.
• Develop a literature review that contains themes and demonstrates synthesis of sources.
• Select an appropriate research design and develop a research purpose statement and research question.
• Design an effective data collection plan.
• Design an effective data analysis plan.
• Demonstrate how to apply ethical and culturally relevant strategies to research design.

Written Requirements

• Length of paper: 10–12 pages, excluding title and reference pages.
• Number of References: Minimum of eight peer-reviewed empirical journal articles which are no more than seven years old.
• Font and font size: Times New Roman, 12 point.