I found this research proposal on a site called academia.edu because it was hard to find any research proposals at all on my subject, and I did not really have any previous knowledge to build on. This proposal is from a student at UC San Diego, and as the title implies the topic is food deserts. This research project would answer several questions. How many households in southeast San Diego have moderate, low, an extremely low access to affordable healthy foods? What do residents report would improve their communities’ food situations? And, are people of color disproportionately living in low access neighborhoods? The proposal consists of an abstract, background information from previous studies on food deserts, the significance of the research, the research design, and appendices including interview questions that would be asked. There are several types of data that need to be gathered, and the proposal suggests gathering reports from the USDA data on food insecurity as well as from store owners/managers and residents via surveys and interviews. It would also require census data for southeast San Diego to learn about racial and ethnic diversity. The responses and results from these sources will be analyzed based on distribution of responses to surveys and how closely these are related to the racial makeup of communities.

The proposal also suggests sharing interview responses and the end results with decision-makers in the city of San Diego in order to have information to be able to improve food security in this area. I think it is important that the researcher proposes to ask residents what they think would improve their community rather than trying to shape policy from only an outside perspective. If carried out, this research would be a step towards giving people of this community a voice in important issues, and if not that, it would at least get participants thinking about these issues.

This sample proposal can be found at: http://www.academia.edu/1479455/Research_Proposal_SAMPLE_Assessing_Food_Insecurity_Food-Access_Inequality_In_Southeast_San_Diego_Households