Comprehensive guide for nursing research proposal for students

Writing a plan for a nursing research study can be hard. This is because of the way study designs are changing and the need to include medical advances in the methods. Students can use this article as a guide for writing a nursing study proposal.

Table of Contents

You may have to write a research proposal as a different paper or include it in your research paper. This does not mean that the proposal paper’s text should change; it should stay the same. Before getting into the details of what a nursing research proposal is, it is important to know what a proposal is and what goes into it.

What is a nursing research proposal?

A nursing research proposal is a paper that explains what you want to study, why it is important, and how you plan to do the research (how you will do it in real life). It shows what your study paper will look like.

A research proposal shows your supervisor, university, or committee that your work meets the needs of your school and is doable with the time and resources you have. The person who will approve your study proposal should be able to see why your idea is good. If they are not satisfied, you should make changes and then send in your paper.

What goes into our nursing research proposal?

A good nursing study proposal should explain why, how, and what of your project. Let us look into this in more depth.

WHAT: the topic of your study

In your nursing study proposal, you should say what you want to talk about. You need to be clear and clear-cut. Your nursing study topic should show what you want to look into and where you want to look into it. For example: “Research of the factors that cause female Y consumers to use a certain brand of makeup with their peers: an American context.” This topic is a big part of the research because it is about the things that make women use a certain brand of makeup. WHO is about the Y female customers, and it takes place in the US.

Make sure your nursing proposal goes into detail about the topic of the study. The message should be obvious. If you do not know what your nursing proposal is about, do not start writing it. You will end up being very confused.

WHY: This is where you explain why.

After putting forward your study topic, explain why it is different. What is different about your topic? Does it fill a hole in what we already know? If your idea has already been looked into, it will not be accepted. But being unique is not enough. You should also explain why your topic is important and what value it will add to the current study.

HOW-your process

It is important to have a theme that is original and different for your nursing research proposal. But your professor will not agree if you have not talked about how it will work in real life. This also means

How you will go about doing your study

Whether or not your design fits the topic of your proposal
Whether your plan is doable with the time and money you have.

Your teacher does not expect you to have a perfect plan for doing research. But you will need to make good design choices and use a good research method. Think about how you will answer the following questions in your nursing study proposal:

Will you take a numeric or qualitative approach?
Will your image run along a line or cut across it?
How will you get the information you need?
How will you do your study analysis?
How long is a plan for a nursing research study?

The length of your proposal depends on where you go to school and what type of degree you are getting. So, before making plans for your proposal, you should always check what your university needs.

A nursing study proposal for a master’s degree is usually between 2500 and 3500 words long. A nurse PhD proposal is between 5000 and 8000 words long. Some colleges want a proposal with a lot of details, while others want fewer words. Before you write, make sure you know what your school wants.

Parts of a study proposal in nursing

Title page

Your nursing study proposal may need a title page, depending on the rules of your school. On the title page, you should have:

The name of the project
Who did the research?
The name of your boss
Your fields and where you go to school

Problem statement

A problem statement clearly describes a problem that needs to be fixed. It shows the difference between how things are now and how they should be in the future. Many students want to know how to write a problem statement for a study paper and how to write a problem statement in nursing. It is easy to figure out.

When you write a description of the problem,
Explain how things will go.
Tell us about your problem and why it is important.
Tell me about the budget
Prove what you say.
Explain why your ideas are important.
Give a brief description of the problem and how to fix it.

Introduction

The beginning of a nursing proposal sets the tone for the whole paper and gives you the idea for your study. Make sure that, after reading your opening, the reader;

Knows what you are trying to do
Find out how much you care about the subject.
Get excited about what your study could lead to.

As you start to write your nursing research proposal, it is helpful to think of the opening as a one- to three-paragraph summary of what you are doing. It is important to quickly answer the following questions in those one to three paragraphs:

What is the most important study question?
What does the problem have to do with the topic of your study proposal?
How will you find out the answer to the study question?
Why is it important to do this research?
What is the point of the study you want to do?
Why are the results of the study you want to do important? Who cares about them?

Abstract

Your teacher may ask you to send an abstract along with your research plan. In this case, your abstract should include a summary of what you plan to study, your research question, a short explanation of how you plan to answer your research question, and what you think the results will be.

All of this information should be well-written in 150 to 250 words. A piece of advice: do not write your abstract until your nursing study proposal is ready. If you have to write an abstract, you must include the 5–7 most important keywords from your study. Sort the buzzwords by how important they are.

What it means and why it is important

This part is meant to explain what your nursing proposal is about and why this study is important. Assume that the person or people who will read your study proposal do not know anything about the problem you are trying to solve.

You do not have to include everything you know about your topic in this section, but you do need to include the most important information that will help you explain the study’s goals. There are no strict rules, but you should try to talk about all or some of the following major ideas:

Say what the research problem is and explain the study’s goal in more detail than you did in the opening.
Explain why the proposed research project is important, make it clear why this study is worth doing, and answer the question “So what?”” query.
Tell us about the main issues or problems that your study will try to solve.
Do not forget to say where and how your study proposal builds on past work in the field.
Explain how you plan to do your study.
Find the most important or relevant data sources you want to use and explain how they will help your study of the topic.
Set the limits for your study proposal so it has a clear point of view.
Say what you are going to study and what you are not going to study.
There are clear explanations of the most important ideas and words.
Because key ideas and terms often have more than one meaning, you should say which one you will use in your study.

Literature review

The part of putting together a study proposal that takes the most time is the literature review. As explained in Chapter 5, the literature review gives your study a background and shows how important the planned research is. It is a summary and analysis of previous study that is relevant to the topic you are looking into. The main goal of the literature review is to put your research project in the context of other research and show the reader that your study is original, creative, and adds to the bigger picture.

Since there is a lot of information in the literature review, this part needs to be well-organized so that the reader can understand the main points of your research. But since there is always a lot of connected information to sort through, it can be easier to say but hard to do. So, instead of trying to sum up all the different kinds of literature you read, it is better to break it down into basic categories or topics when writing the report. In Chapter 5, you will learn how to organize your ideas in different ways.

Here are some tips for putting together your literature review:

Think about the questions that other experts have asked, the methods they used, the results they got, and the suggestions they made based on the data they gathered.
Do not be afraid to question what other studies have found and what they have concluded.
Look at what you think is missing from earlier research and explain how your study fills in the gaps and/or adds to the body of knowledge.
Look at what you think is missing from earlier research and explain how your study fills in the gaps and/or adds to the body of knowledge.

It is important to note that deciding when to stop is one of the hardest parts of doing a book study. Because of this, it is important to know when you have found the most important categories of ideas that support your study question. When you see the same conclusions or ideas over and over, you can be sure that you have covered all of the main theoretical groups in your literature study.

It is also important to know that researchers often go back to the literature as they gather and review data. For example, when managing and/or analyzing data, an unexpected result may come up. In this case, it is important to take a step back and look at the literature again to make sure that no other experts have found a similar result. This could mean looking at research from other areas than your own.

This happened because one of the textbook’s authors did research on how communities can be strong. According to the researchers, during the interviews, many of the volunteers talked about their own resilience factors and how they thought these factors made the group as a whole more resilient. When Sheppard and Williams first looked at the research on community and environmental resilience, they did not find these specific traits.

When they went back to the research to look for individual factors that affect resilience, they found very little work in child and youth psychology. Because of this, Sheppard and Williams had to go back to their study of the literature and add a new section on individual factors of resilience. Surprisingly, it seemed like their study was the first to find a link between individual and group resilience variables.

How and where to do research

The goal of this part of the research proposal is to show the reader that your general study analysis and design methods will let you solve the research problem you have chosen and explain the results of your research clearly and quickly. Because of this, the section on the study plan and methods must be well-written, clear, and well-organized. This shows your reader that you have given some thought to what you want to do and how you are going to do it. In the end, you want your reader to think you have what it takes to finish this research job on time.

This part of your nursing research proposal should be about the exact goals of your research. It is also important to use examples from the review of the literature that relate to your strategy and suggested method. You must show how your study design and methods build on and add to previous research. What kinds of methods, for example, have other researchers used in similar studies?

It is important to look at what other experts have done, but it is just as important, if not more important, to think about what methods have not been used but could be. Remember that the methods part is not just a list of things to do. It also explains why and how the tasks you have mentioned will help you look into the research problem and answer your research question (or questions).

Tips on how to write this part

Describe the ways you will gather information and the ways you will examine it.
Explain how you will do your research and how you will make sense of the results in relation to the study problem.
Do not just say what you want to accomplish with the tools you have picked.
Explain how you will use the methods, such as by coding conversation text or running regression analysis.
Plan for and list any problems you might run into while doing your study, and explain how you plan to get around them.
Explain where you think problems with collecting data, like getting access to people and information, might come up.

Hypotheses and assumptions based on what we know so far

This part should explain how you think your research will improve, change, or add to what is already known in the field. It would be helpful if you also talked about how your expected results might affect future research, based on the goals and objectives of your study. Is it possible, for example, that your study will lead to a new plan, way of thinking about something, or way of analyzing data?

How might your study affect research that comes after it? What advice does your study have for people who want to work in the field? What or who could your study help? What effect could your study have on issues in the environment, society, or the economy?

Even though it is important to think about and talk about these options, it is also important to be realistic about what you want to happen. To put it another way, you do not want to waste time guessing about things. Instead, the goal is for each of you to think about what you do not know and explain how you think your study will start to fill in some or all of those gaps.

Conclusion

The conclusion restates why your nursing research plan is important and necessary and gives a brief summary of the whole study. This part should be one or two lines long at most. Here’s what a closing outline looks like:

Talk about why the study is important. Please explain how you think your study will add to what is already known and how it is different. Explain the study’s clear goal and the research questions it will try to answer.

Explain why the study design and methods used in this research are appropriate and why other methods and strategies were not used. Give an idea of what you think the results of your study will be. Give an idea of how your study fits into the larger body of knowledge about the topic that is already out there.

Referencing and referencing

You must list all the sources you used in your nursing research plan, just like you would in any academic research paper. This could be in the form of a reference list or a bibliography in a study proposal. In a reference list, you can find all of the information you used in the body of your study proposal.

All of the references from the references part must be in the body of the proposal. Remember that you can not say “as shown in…” As a researcher, you should always check the information in its original form. Even the best experts sometimes get their citations wrong. So, it is very important not to make the same mistakes as someone else. This is the right way to do a literature review, even though it takes a long time and is hard work.

On the other hand, a bibliography lists everything you used or cited in your planned study, along with citations to any important sources that are important to understanding the study challenge. In other words, you may not use all of the sources in your bibliography in the body of your research paper. Find out from your professor which of two ways of citing sources you should use.

In general, your list of citations should show that you did enough previous research to make sure that your research would add to past research instead of duplicating it. The American Psychological Association (APA) is the standard for citing sources for social scientists. Most of the time, the word count of a study proposal does not include the reference list (also called a bibliography). Again, make sure with your professor that you are on the right track.

Nursing research proposal topics

Here are some nursing research proposal ideas you can consider for your paper:

ADHD symptoms and how to treat it
What has changed in newborn care in the previous 50 years?
Stem cell therapies for children’s disorders
What advances have been made in the treatment of childhood cancer?
Obesity in children has several causes
How children’s health can influence their health later in life
The leading causes of child death
Obesity prevention measures for children
Early-life effects of second-hand smoke inhalation
Environmental contaminants have a negative impact on the fetus
How to Prevent Infant Injuries During Labour and Delivery
How may child care in inpatient hospitals be improved?
Diabetes in children has genetic influences
How can malnutrition in children be avoided?
How to deal with psychological concerns in children who are suffering from physical ailments
Antibiotic resistance in children
Pediatric care ethics
Effects of environmental contaminants on children’s health
How effective are therapies for malnutrition in children?
Is newborn care better now than it was 50 years ago?
Antibiotics affect children’s immunity
How to recognize and treat children’s respiratory ailments

These are just a few nursing research proposal topic examples for your paper. There are others like public health research proposal topics and physical health topics among others.

Nursing research proposal example online

A good example of a nursing proposal should include all the important information and cover the whole area of interest. It should talk about all the study methods that worked and pull from different sources. There should be a balance of facts and theories, excluding judgments and personal views.

Your school should look into all of the nursing research paper examples that the department uses. This is to make sure that everything in the papers is true. The papers should show that the information is well-researched.

To sum up

Writing a nursing study proposal is not as easy as it may sound. This article tells you everything you need to know to write a nursing study proposal. We think it will be easy for you if you have read this far.

A research proposal demonstrates what you will investigate in your research paper, the importance of your research and how you will perform the research. How long a nursing study proposal should be depends on what your professor tells you to do. The paper is whole because it has different parts. While writing, ensure that you do not miss any of the parts.

Do not worry if you still need help coming up with a good idea or writing a nursing research proposal. Contact us now. We help students write nursing study proposals at prices they can afford.