Research Plan

Pick three of the hypotheses (one directional/descriptive; one moderation; and one mediation) for your analysis plan. Every research plan must include the following sections:

Section 1 – Research Strategy Research Design

Describe your overall study design. For example:

• What type of design is it?
• How many waves of data collection will you have?
• How many groups of people would you have?
• Would it be an observational or experimental study (some sort of intervention or treatment)

Sampling Plan

• Describe the sample you would collect
• Describe target population and sample’s inclusion and exclusion criteria
• Describe your sampling frame (if any) and its representativeness
• Provide target sample size and discuss any stratification
• Discuss your sampling and recruitment protocol
• List strengths and weaknesses of your sampling strategy
• Present results from a power analysis to justify your target sample size
• This should link to your analysis plan; the 2-variable descriptive hypothesis is easiest/most straightforward
• State estimated effect size, alpha level, type of statistic that would be used (t-test, linear regression, etc.)
• Describe the formulas used (include sources of formulas or tables referred to in your calculations)

Section 2 – Analysis Plan

Measures

For every construct included in the hypotheses:

• Indicate each question involved in testing the hypothesis (refer to item numbers on final, formatted instrument)
• Describe any recodes or other transformations required.
• Be specific- how will you create the scale? Will items be summed and averaged, etc...?
• Write this like a manuscript’s methods section, except in future tense

Analyses

• Write out analysis plans for at least 3 hypotheses. For each hypothesis: describe the statistical tests. and the series of steps you will use to test each hypothesis 
• Descriptive hypothesis: must include either one continuous and one categorical variable or two continuous variables

Section 3 – Appendices

References. As noted above, all references cited—including websites—should be complete and presented in a standard format (such as American Psychological Association 6th Edition).

Question Matrix/Codebook for study constructs, including details about how each variable will be coded (e.g. will you dichotomize the measure, etc..) and/or combined with other items/transformed for analysis.