Planning Research Project Example

[Nathen Paisley]

Overallresearch plans offer an overview about the initiative taking place and serve as a kick-off document for a project. Their beauty lies in their capacity to keep your team on track, to ensure overarching goals are well-defined and agreed upon, and to guarantee those goals are met by the research.

After some back and forth, you get a handle on what the product team is hoping to learn. Their goal is to increase retention rates and user satisfaction. They want to know: Why do customers not order more frequently? And how do customers decide what they want to order?

We want to understand the reasons behind why certain customers are reordering at a higher frequency, as well as the barriers encountered by customers that prevent them from reordering on the platform (problem statement).

First, start with the central problem statement: to understand the reasons behind why certain customers are reordering at a higher frequency, as well as the barriers encountered by customers that prevent them from reordering on the platform.

Bring in internal stakeholders that may have a good idea of what the target user will look like (such as marketing, sales, and customer support). With these stakeholders you can create hypotheses about who your users are, which is a great starting point for who you should be talking to.

During this session, we are looking to better understand what makes you order food from our service. Imagine we're filming a small documentary on you, and are really trying to understand all your thoughts. There are no right or wrong answers, so please just talk freely, and I promise we will find it fascinating.

Central research problem: To understand the reasons behind why certain customers are reordering at a higher frequency, as well as the barriers encountered by customers that prevent them from reordering on the platform.

Those are all the questions I have for you today. I really appreciate you taking the time. Your feedback was extremely helpful, and I am excited to share it with the team to see how we can improve.

Since your feedback was so useful, would you be willing to participate in another research session in the future? You have my direct email, so if you have any problems with the compensation or any questions or feedback in the future, please feel free to email me at any time.

Whether it actively guides your interviews, or just provides an active structure for organizing your thoughts, a solid research plan can go a long way towards guaranteeing a solid research project.

Essentially, I reverse-plan a paper or a research project (specifically the outputs) by taking the end date of the project submission (for example, a conference paper submission deadline) and backtracking the steps to achieve what I need to do. I will use an example of a paper I am coauthoring with Dr. Amanda Murdie (University of Georgia) for the International Studies Association conference in February of 2017. Both Amanda and I are really big on organization, so it is REALLY easy to coauthor with someone with the same kind of planning skills.

The paper needs to be submitted at least one week before the deadline (February 23 is our panel), so Amanda and I plan to write the entire paper in the next few weeks. Therefore we are planning to meet a few times in between, and to do some work on our own to contribute to the paper. We have scheduled a couple of meetings in January and at least one in February to discuss the paper submission and the Power Point presentation. The paper draft needs to be perfect by February 16th, which means we need to have a solid draft by February 9th so we can do final editing, formatting, etc. and start thinking about the Power Point presentation right about then.

Always follow your funding opportunity's instructions for application format. Although these applications demonstrate good grantsmanship, time has passed since these grant recipients applied. The samples may not reflect the latest format or rules. NIAID posts new samples periodically.

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The Research Enhancement Award (R15) program supports small-scale research projects to expose students to research and strengthen the research environment at educational institutions that have not been major recipients of NIH support. They are awarded for up to 3 years.

The R21/R33 supports a two-phased award without a break in funding. It begins with the R21 phase for milestone-driven exploratory or feasibility studies with a possible transition to the R33 phase for expanded development. Transition to the second phase depends on several factors, including the achievement of negotiated milestones.

The SBIR (R43/R44) and STTR (R41/R42) programs support domestic small businesses to engage in research and development with the potential for commercialization. Read more about NIAID Small Business Programs.

*Dr. Mark Poritz submitted the original grant application. In the course of the first year of funding, Dr. Andrew Hemmert took on increasing responsibility for the work. For the grant renewal, Dr. Poritz proposed that Dr. Hemmert replace him as the PI.

The Research Scientist Development Award (K01) supports those with a research or health-professional doctoral degree and research development plans in epidemiology, computational modeling, or outcomes research. Read more about NIAID Research Career Development (K) Awards.

The Mentored Clinical Scientist Research Career Development Award (K08) supports those with current work in biomedical or behavioral research, including translational research, a clinical doctoral degree such as M.D., D.V.M., or O.D., and a professional license to practice in the United States. Read more about NIAID Research Career Development (K) Awards.

The Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award (K23) supports those with a clinical doctoral degree, who have the potential to develop into productive, clinical investigators, and who have made a commitment to focus their research endeavors on patient-oriented research. Read more about NIAID Research Career Development (K) Awards.

The Extramural Associate Research Development Award (EARDA) (G11) provides funds to institutions eligible to participate in the NIH Extramural Associates Program for establishing or enhancing an office of sponsored research and for other research infrastructure needs. Search for NIAID G11 Opportunities.

The U01 research project cooperative agreement supports a discrete, specified, circumscribed project for investigators to perform in their areas of specific interest and competency. Learn more about NIAID Cooperative Agreements (U).

is professor of sociology at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Her research has won international awards both for scholarly quality and impact on public life. She has published dozens of articles and three books, most recently the bestseller Capital without Borders (2016), now translated into five languages.

Good research questions tend to beget more questions. This can be frustrating for those who want to get down to business right away. Try to make room for the unexpected: this is usually how knowledge advances. Many of the most significant discoveries in human history have been made by people who were looking for something else entirely. There are ways to structure your research planning process without over-constraining yourself; the two exercises below are a start, and you can find further methods in the Links and Books section.

This exercise prompts you to select and clarify your general interest area, develop a research question, and investigate sources of information. The annotated bibliography will also help you refine your research question so that you can begin the second assignment, a description of the phenomenon you wish to study.

Under its 2003 data sharing policy, NIH expects investigators to submit a data sharing plan with requests for funding or grants, cooperative agreements, intramural research, contracts, or other funding agreements of $500,000 or more per year.

Data sharing plans should describe how an applicant will share their final research data. The specifics of the plan will vary on a case-by-case basis, depending on the type of data to be shared and how the investigator plans to share the data.

The exact content and level of detail to be included in a data sharing plan depends on the specifics of the project, such as how the investigator is planning to share data, or the size and complexity of the dataset. The examples below give a sense of what a data sharing plan can look like.

Example 1

This application requests support to collect public-use data from a survey of more than 22,000 Americans over the age of 50 every 2 years. Data products from this study will be made available without cost to researchers and analysts. User registration is required in order to access or download files. As part of the registration process, users must agree to the conditions of use governing access to the public release data, including restrictions against attempting to identify study participants, destruction of the data after analyses are completed, reporting responsibilities, restrictions on redistribution of the data to third parties, and proper acknowledgment of the data resource. Registered users will receive user support, as well as information related to errors in the data, future releases, workshops, and publication lists. The information provided to users will not be used for commercial purposes, and will not be redistributed to third parties.

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