Preliminary topics are submitted by the students and approved by the instructor. There is enormous latitude in the subject matter allowed. Then, formal written proposals are submitted and these are carefully critiqued and edited. Each proposal is presented orally to the entire class, where further questions are raised and the student's peers make recommendations. The entire research enterprise is bounded by the 11 week quarter, from initial proposal to final paper in publishable format.
Students execute their research protocols and collect data.
Support for statistical analysis is provided by the instructor and by user friendly computer programs available to students in the department. The final reports are written up and the results are presented orally to the entire class. The time line for these events is shown in Table 3. Some activities may overlap since some proposals are approved earlier than others. While it is common that many graduate level courses in research methods require the preparation of proposals and research designs, few of these studies are actually carried out.