A. Identify and Describe What is to Be Studied, and Justify the Selection
1. What generally is to be studied and what general questions are you interested in answering? Processes? Problems? Relationships (causal, merely correlational)?

2. Review relevant theory and research, and your own experience. Summarize in the form of a table, a model, or both.

3. Based on #2, what specific questions or phenomena will be studied; e.g., hypotheses to test; specific possible relationships or processes to examine?

4. Argue that the specific questions or phenomena can be addressed in a study. That is, there are participating organizations, groups, and individuals; you can obtain relevant information (data); and you can analyze the data.

5. Justify the study--timely; relevant to a practical or theoretical problem; fill gaps in practical knowledge or theory; generalization to other persons, settings, and situations; sharpen definitions or suggest limits of empirical generalizations; suggest generalizability or the limits of practices; create or improve research instruments and methods.

6. Identify audiences for the findings or methods: custodians of theory; practitioners of some kind; policy makers and/or administrators. Identify possible benefits or contributions of the research. 7. What sort of research is planned: pilot project (basic or applied), replication research, demonstration, dissemination, evaluation, critical experiment.

B. Background assumptions
1. etic (observer's) vs emic (members') perspective or combined

2. nomothetic vs idiographic

3. level of organization

4. complexity and size of population

C. Proposed Methodology
1. If idiographic, descriptive, inductive and qualitative, use case studies, ethnographic research, phenomenological research, historical research, nonexperimental survey

2. If nomothetic, deductive, and quantitative, use nonexperimental survey and/or experimental research.

D. Describe and Justify Methods of Data Collection
1. Cross-sectional or longitudinal (cohort or panel study)

2. Methods of data collection:
a. When doing case studies, ethnographic research, phenomenological research, historical research, and some nonexperimental surveys, generally use narrative recording (running records and specimen description; field notes; interviews; task analysis; possibly questionnaires; possibly official statistics and organizational documents (e.g., with descriptions or narratives)

b. When doing experiments and some nonexperimental surveys, generally use event recording (continuous and intermittent), rating scales, tests, possibly questionnaires, possibly official statistics and organizational documents (e.g., with numbers)

3. Describe protocols (operating procedures).

E. What is Your Sampling Plan?
1. What is the population for which the research is relevant?

2. What is the population, pool, or frame from which your sample will be drawn?

3. How will the sample be drawn from the pool? Simple random sampling? Stratified random sampling? Proportional sampling? Cluster sampling? Snowball sampling? Purposive sampling?.

4. If comparison groups will be involved (as in an experiment or survey), how will participants be assigned? Random allocation? Matching? Self-selection? Existing groups?

F. How will data be analyzed and presented?

G. How will conclusions and interpretations be made?