Methods for the Research Proposal, Case Study Example

Method/Research Procedure/Methodology:

The method of doing research for the proposal will be the case study method or case report which is an explanatory, or exploratory, descriptive analysis of a group, person or event. Case study method will be necessary in analyzing the events that occasion child poverty, the persons pertinent to it, periods that affect outcome of these children, decisions, policies, projects, institutions, and other systems that influence it, which will be studied holistically using one or more methods. The case studies will find underlying principles by exploring causation and in most parts will be retrospective by establishing criteria for selection of cases, which are from historical records to be included in the study. Case study is an approach to research proposal positioned between data taking techniques, which are concrete, as well as methodology paradigms.

The case or subject of the study will be child poverty, which is an instance of class of phenomena in order to provide an analytical frame (object within the confines of the study). The analytical frame, which these case studies will explicate and illuminate, will be the effects of poverty on educational and life experiences of children and young people. These case studies will investigate the phenomenon of child poverty within its context (real-life). The case studies for this research proposal will involve quantitative evidence; rely on several sources of evidence, and benefits from previous developments of some theoretical propositions. The research on the single subject of child poverty will provide the statistical framework, which will be used to make inferences from the quantitative data of the case studies. This is a form of a critical case, which will have importance strategically when related to the problem in general and will allow for generalization.

Participants:

For the research proposal, two case studies will be used. One will focus on child poverty and the other on assets, inequality, and the transition to adulthood. The participants in the child poverty case study will be drawn from three thousand counties across the United States with data provided at four points in the sample. The individual participants (families) will be drawn from places within the counties that have documented child poverty rates, which are greater than twenty percent in any of the given years of study. The study will involve stratified sampling. These participants will be divided into five types (strata) depending on county of origin. These will be marked as counties with persistent high child poverty, frequent high child poverty, intermittent high child poverty, infrequent high child poverty, and no high child poverty. From this population, a representative sample will be drawn by assigning numbers to each participant in every group and selecting randomly fifty families from each category. In the second case study, the participants will be seven hundred young adults drawn from a population of ten thousand young adults from all the states in the United States of America and categorized into four groups. The groups or strata are low income, high income, low wealth, and high wealth and created through dividing the sample at medians of income. A representative sample will be drawn from the population by putting together (correlating) families below (low/low) the median income and wealth and the other families above (high/high) the median income and wealth, then in those categories assigning numbers and choosing randomly from each half of the representative sample.

Research Design:

The research design to be used will be used immediately (has immediate application) thus will be applied research. The practical application of science involves a form of systematic inquiry. This research will access and use a part of what has been accumulated in the research community. Therefore, data will come from theories, methods, techniques, and knowledge in archives for the purpose of this research proposal linked with child poverty and young people. This applied research will attempt to solve the practical problems and employ general empirical methodologies.

Instrumentation and Data Collection Plans:

We will examine rates of child poverty using decennial data from the census carried out in the last three decades including the five-year estimates of the American Community Survey (ACS) carried out as from year 2005 to the year 2009. Demographic data for every one of the counties will be collected from the United States Bureau (USA County data files). This is for the first case study on child poverty. The process of collecting data from the USB will involve addressing access and identification, then interviewing the staff at the United States Bureau. This will involve use of multiple methods in order to satisfy accuracy and validity of the sample. As for the second case study, establishing information or data on income will involve a structured interview, which is a quantitative research method that will aid in the survey research. This will ensure that every interviewee is given the same questions and in a particular order. The reason for this is in order to aggregate answers reliably and make comparisons confidently between the sample subgroups. The seven hundred families will be mailed the questionnaires with mail back stamp duty catered for in order to ensure maximum response.

Proposed Analysis of the Data

By choosing to study the concentration of persistent poverty facing children in rural America, this research will demonstrate how child poverty affects all children from the rural to urban areas. The variables in this first case study are the number of people in every category of interest such as the unemployed, the educated, and non-educated. These variables in determining child poverty are dependent variables while the counties are the independent variables. The decision-making will be done using multiple criteria (Spatial decision-making) by collapsing the multi-facet problem of child poverty and simplifying it into a single objective to be used for analysis in this case the effects of poverty on educational and life experiences of children and young people. The validity of the measurements used in this analysis intact from the source material. The validity of variables can be measured from the fact that counties provide data that is consistent historically.

For the second case study that is important in this research proposal, the variables used are the households’ level of income as the dependent variable and the different ages of the growth process as the independent variables. It is expected that young adults who lived in the homes with more total net worth during early childhood will be highly likely to have positive outcomes of interest. The study also aims to establish the disparity between the educational achievements and life experiences of the financially stable households and the poor households. The validity of these measurements can be assessed through the existing studies on the same topic and the outcomes evident in different households with varying incomes.