Research Proposal

In this assignment, I wrote a Research Proposal for my UWP001 course research project, titled ‘Student Behaviors and Practices to Improve UC Davis Cybersecurity Readiness’. As part of this project, I intend to address the specific research questions: 1) What specific student behaviors and practices impact the levels of cybersecurity readiness at a college? and 2) What is the current levels of adoption of leading student behaviors and practices that would improve cybersecurity readiness at UC Davis?

The assignment taught me that a Research Proposal is a very effective tool to help explain the significance of a project to our audience. It clearly articulates the specific research questions that we intent to address as part of the research project. I believe that it is very essential to define a meaningful topic for conducting research, backed by analysis of the relevance of it to the larger audience. Without this audience litmus test we would risk going doing an endless hole embarking on a project that would be devoid of the real benefits to the community at large.

The most challenging part was framing effective research questions that are clear (i.e., specific, and that do not require additional explanation), concise, focused, complex (not a simple yes/no questions), and arguable. Drafting these questions requires multiple iterations, however, once you do that well enough, then the rest of the research and analysis becomes extremely structured. The Research Proposal provides the opportunity to think about and include various structural elements like the research questions, timeline, bibliography, etc that could be further worked upon. The peer feedback was another helpful method that helped in improving the research proposal further, as it determined from a different perspective what could be an area of focus, something that I did not think would be as important initially.