This assignment asks you to produce aone-pageproposal describing the research method you will use to investigate research questions or hypotheses related to consumers use of social networking sites (SNSs) for brand communication.

Due Date:The Proposal is due on December 2, 2018 by 11:59 (submit via the assignments dropbox).

Paper format: A Word Document only (not a PDF) that is no more than one page, double-spaced which includes a title of the proposal, and your name.

Assignment Goals:This assignment has three interrelated goals:

1. To help you identify and develop an effective research method that investigates a strategic communication topic.

2. To give you practice working with the research proposal as an academic genre.

3. To provide an opportunity for working on stylistics and effective academic discourse in the communication discipline.

The research methods proposal paper is based on the information, expertise and knowledge you gained when you worked on the focus group paper (assignment II). If you recall, your focus group paper focused on questions attempted to discover why and how people (consumers) use SNSs for brand communications. While working on this assignment, you had to review some background information from relevant literature to develop a strong conceptual basis for the topic. Now that you are knowledgeable about this topic (If not, please review the paper you created for assignment II), you should be able to come up with possible research questions and/or hypotheses that your proposed research methods should address effectively.

Your paper should contain the following:

1) Two research questionsORtwo hypothesesORa combination of one research question and one hypothesis that are related to the assigned topic (i.e., consumers use of SNSs to communicate about brands and products).

2) What research method from all the methods we covered in the course (i.e., survey, experiment, interview, content analysis) is best suited to investigate your research questions or hypotheses.Do not select focus groups as your research method, because we have already worked on it in Assignment II. Explain the rationale (why) for your selection.

3) Briefly describe the profile of the sample that you will use in your proposed study.

4) Identify the variables that you will include in this study. Which ones are dependent and which ones are independent if your proposal includes hypotheses.

5) A very short conclusion (three sentences or so) that explains why it is important to investigate this topic, what could be the potential contribution of such research.

Overall, make your proposal an interesting piece to read!