This alternative is one you may want to consider if you plan to do Independent Work (LSC 593) on a topic related to public library youth services. A research proposal is a realistic project for this course; to carry out a well-designed independent piece of research in a single semester would probably not be possible. (Research involving human subjects would take the longest, because it would first be necessary to gain approval from the Internal Review Board. Surveys, focus group interviews, and quasi-experimental field studies all involve human subjects.)

Standard elements of a research proposal:

• an introduction, which includes both a problem statement (which usually has to do with the real-world importance of the research, but may also mention the gaps or flaws in previous research and the need for this new study to extend or refine earlier findings) and a purpose statement (explaining exactly what this new study is going to do)
• a review of existing research on the problem
• a methods section, outlining the procedures to be followed in gathering and analyzing data; for instance:
  • information about youth Internet access will be collected by means of a questionnaire sent to youth personnel in all RI public libraries, and a statistical analysis program will be used to calculate correlations between aspects of public library youth Internet access and municipal demographic characteristics gleaned from census statistics; or
  • researchers will interview public library youth personnel, and will conduct focus group interviews with children in upper elementary and middle school who use public library web sites; the interview transcripts will be subjected to content analysis
• a discussion of what results are expected from the study, and what those results could mean for the field

A report on completed research starts the same way:

• Introduction, with problem and purpose statements
• Review of existing research
• Methods – which can now be reported in more detail (exactly how many youth personnel received the survey? exactly how were the children recruited; or where were the focus groups interviewed, and how long did they last?)
• Findings – what percentage of the surveys were returned? what correlations were statistically significant? what major themes emerged from content analysis of interview transcripts?
• Discussion
• Conclusions

Some aspects of the research may be squeezed into different sections. Somewhere (in the introduction? in the methods section?) it’s important to define terms precisely, and to state the research hypothesis or question as clearly as possible. The way you write up your research depends partly on the paradigm you’re using (is it quantitative or qualitative?).

Collaboration on a research project is encouraged. It is expected that all members of a team will contribute. Some of the tasks:

• Identifying, locating and retrieving sources for the literature review
• Analyzing findings from previous studies identified, and determining what they mean and what they leave unaddressed
• Defining a purpose statement (closely related to the research hypothesis or question) – this entails careful operational definitions of the variables you care about most, and a ruthless willingness to leave out of the study elements that are just too much to tackle given your limited time and resources – so it can be a real negotiating challenge
• Figuring out the possible ways of answering your important question(s), and then figuring out which is the best way (given limited time and resources, again)
• Designing methods – this entails drafting and pretesting surveys, or deciding what (if any) rewards to give children who participate, and writing cover letters and permission forms and getting IRB approval (they’ll make us take a special training session for researchers using human subjects before they’ll approve), etc.
• And if a group shoves ahead and actually does the research – stuffing envelopes, carrying out interviews, transcribing from tapes, entering data, etc. – it’s hard to think of all of it until you’re actually there, and of course no one study needs to involve all of these activities.

Last year's class discussed the possibility of doing research on how children and teens use the Internet – either through the public library, or instead of the public library, or in combination with other media – because demographic statistics don’t tell us all we’d like to know about the constituents we serve. Here are a couple of possible ideas for a group project:

• Content analysis of public library web pages for children and/or young adults. Questions that could be answered this way: how do library web designers apparently expect young people to use the library’s online resources? An advantage of this kind of study: we could do it without interviewing or surveying human subjects, and therefore would not need IRB approval and should be able to complete the project by the end of April. Disadvantage: tells us directly about librarians, not kids.
• Survey of children and/or young adults. Questions we might ask: What media (books, TV, movies, videogames, Internet) do respondents prefer? How much time do they spend on different media? Where? What kind of content do they prefer in each medium? Advantage: this kind of information tells us about the kids themselves, and can be roughly correlated with demographic statistics (although maybe only on a town-by-town or school-by-school basis; too much individual prying might reduce our response rate). Disadvantage: survey questions are round holes to fit square pegs into – to get comparable information from lots of people, survey method depends on limiting the amount of information from individuals.
• Interviews with children and/or young adults known to have used the public library’s web site. Questions we might ask: what parts of the site do you use? how? how does the public library site fit into your overall Internet use? what do you like about the site? what would you like to see changed? Advantage: this could be a form of direct consumer research. Disadvantage: information from qualitative studies is unwieldy to analyze, and can’t really be generalized.