Project
Freelancing research proposal

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Program Objective
This proposal demonstrates how I meet the following program objective:

• conducting primary and secondary research that will add to knowledge in my field

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Working on this project allowed me to explore a potential research project in my field. There is not much research available on freelancing in the technical writing field, so I wanted to propose a research project that would fill in gaps in research.

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Context
This research proposal was completed as part of a final project for a Preparing to Freelance course taught by Dr. Karen Kuralt. The freelancing field is growing and is a popular way for technical writers to make money. Despite its popularity, there are not many scholarly articles that discuss freelancing and it is difficult to find research about it. This project allowed me to analyze current research regarding freelancing and explore an area that interested me.

 

Audience 
This was a class project read by my professor and peers. The proposal was written as if to propose the project to an IRB (institutional review board), but the style was less formal. We discussed our research ideas in class, but did not present anything to an IRB.  

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Process
My proposal focuses on researching freelancing for a small business vs. a large corporation. During the first draft of the proposal, I was mostly focused on the differences between these two types of freelancing. But after a conference with Dr. Kuralt, she helped me realize that I shouldn’t automatically assume that the two are different. There could be a lot of similarities. That is why this research proposal was important. Freelancers have questions about the kind of work they can do, the best or easiest way to make money, how to maintain a healthy work-life balance, etc. There should be research out there that covers these topics.  

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I used the UALR library website to search for scholarly articles regarding freelancing in the corporate world and freelancing for small businesses. During my research, I found a lot of articles about medical writing freelancing.  This was surprising to me because this specific field of writing had so much research, but it was difficult to find information about other fields for freelancers. My literature review consisted of mainly scholarly articles on corporate freelancing and general freelancing. I found an article through Google that was about freelancers at small businesses.  I wanted to see more articles about specific types of and/or fields in freelancing. Most of what I encountered was generic freelancing and how to be successful in that.

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The best way to conduct the research seemed like interviews and/or email surveys. I wanted experienced freelancers who had worked for at least three different clients, either local small businesses or local corporations. To ensure I am getting accurate and unrestricted data, I wanted to ensure anonymity of not only the participants but their employers as well. I then developed a list of detailed research questions. I learned that when you conduct research, you technically only get one shot to ask all of your questions and you can only ask questions from your proposal.  If you want to ask anything else or get more information, you have to go through a whole process again to get the questions approved. Once the surveys and/or interviews were completed, I chose to analyze the responses using coding methods I had learned in my Research Methods class. Data coding seems like the best way to analyze interview transcripts because it provides a way to easily search for patterns and commonalities in the participants’ responses.