In Chapter 1 of your proposal or dissertation, you will address the research tradition or approach, research design, and research methods that you anticipate employing for your study. In addition to this, you will write a section on your conceptual framework that needs to be expressed in a short narrative and depicted graphically in a diagram. It is important to develop your thinking about the key concepts that comprise the foundation of your topic and how these concepts are related to one another. You will draft both items for this assignment.

For this Individual Project, you are tasked with articulating and depicting key concepts that drive the argument that you are developing about your research topic as well as the connections between or among these concepts. This is called a conceptual or theoretical framework. Thinking about how these concepts are related aids you in building your logic and argument about your research topic and provides guidance throughout your entire research process.

One way to think about this is that you are in the process of moving into a new apartment. Your overarching research topic is represented by the apartment. Because you are a busy person, it is logical for you to argue that you should put everything that needs to end up in the new apartment in boxes, which are marked as follows:

Kitchen

Living room

Dining room

Bedroom

Bathroom

Hence, settling into the apartment is made more straightforward. To keep this scenario simple, imagine that you do not have a lot of stuff and therefore only need one box bearing each one of these labels. All of these boxes are related to the concept of an apartment, so you can make the argument that they must all end up there. They are bounded by their relationship to the apartment. Furthermore, the box marked kitchen contains items that are used primarily in the kitchen, and there are many kitchen items in that box. Thus, the kitchen box could be thought of as a concept related to the apartment, and individual items within that box might also be thought of as concepts that are related to one another (e.g., a fork and a plate are related to one another in that they are used for eating food). The same can be said for other boxes. However, it could also be argued that items from the kitchen box might get used in the living room or dining room. One could argue, for example, that a fork and plate could get used in the living room if you are going to eat dinner while streaming a movie on your TV. Similarly, a hand towel intended for the kitchen could also end up being used in the bathroom.

If this apartment exercise does not resonate with your experience, engage in this thought experiment using a different foundational concept, such as the following:

The human skeleton as the foundation for all of its associated components

A hanger as a device on which various types of clothing can be hung

A newly built house and its framing, drywall, electrical wiring, plumbing, HVAC ducts, windows, doors, and decor

For this Individual Project, think of the boxes as containers for scholarly literature about subtopic categories related in some way to the research topic that you have identified. Note that the diagram or figure that you create represents the skeleton of the conceptual framework that pictorially depicts the argument that you will construct about your research on your chosen research topic. It is important to realize that this is just the beginning. Eventually, you will also want to craft a narrative that describes your diagram. To reiterate, the conceptual framework that you build today to help you make your argument about your topic is going to change over time as you learn more about it and as you continue to develop your proposal.