Throughout the next six weeks, you will plan and propose aqualitative research design of your choice, which may (or may not)involve an area of interest for your doctoral dissertation. You willselect a research topic, generate researchable questions, reviewrelevant literature, describe participant selection procedures, identifydata collection methods, address potential ethical problems, anddescribe limitations of your research proposal.

This assignment is the first step toward completing your FinalResearch Proposal in Week 6. Every research project begins with awell-understood topic.

After thinking about a topic area you are interested in researching,conduct a preliminary literature search on that topic using ProQuest,EBSCOhost, or another library search engine. ProQuest has a databasecalled “Dissertations & Theses” that will be especially useful forfinding dissertations that have been written on your topic.

Find the results of at least five studies (including at least twodissertations) related to your topic. Create a table that lists keyaspects of those studies, including: author, date, methodology, methodsused, and key findings. You may want to include the full APA formattedreference entry in your table, or you may put your full reference listin a page following the table. See sample table below for the topic of“student-faculty conflict.

• A few paragraphs describing what your topic area is. Tell why this topic is important to you.
• Your table of at least five studies, listing authors, date, methodology (fieldwork approach), methods used, and key findings.
• An APA formatted reference list of the studies in the compiled table.

Keep adding to your table throughout this course as you will need touse it to write a literature review on your topic in Week 6.

Sample Literature Review Table

[Example Topic: Student-Faculty Conflict]

List all the related studies and how they were conducted, and the key findings: