Sample Legalization of Marijuana Research Paper Proposal

Introduction

The purpose of this study has been from the start a desire to assess the manner in which students are seeing the important issue of drug usage. The desire to assess their attitudes towards drug use and drug decriminalization points to the belief on the part of this research that students in particular have a useful and important set of opinions and values that can affect public and social policies and perceptions. This study will include a careful assessment of the questions being crafted as well as the answers that are given so that there are clear measures that are being set up to be illuminated by the questionnaires. The breakdown of the information and the data as it will be assessed and the overall point by point information in the research is listed below.

Research Questions

This research aims to look into the motivations and attitudes as well as perceptions of college students towards the charge to decriminalize marijuana across the country. Will college students have a liberal and open attitude towards the decriminalization of Marijuana? Are their attitudes towards drug use liberal and open in general?

Hypothesis

I believe that with regard to both of these the answer will in fact be yes and there will be a positive response for both of these questions.

Population

The population of this study will be college aged students. The overall population will only be selected based on their age range as well as their attendance of college. The reason for this group being selected is based on the fact that the specific question that this research is attempting to answer is the exact manner in which college students are viewing the issues of drug usage as well as drugs being decriminalized.

Sample

Specifically, there will be a look at individuals from the age of 18-30 who attend the George Mason University located in Northern Virginia. There will be every effort to ensure a truly diverse and equal mix in terms of gender for this study as well. This itself can be accomplished through the use of the students on the campus which is already diverse in its setting.

Data Collection Procedures

The Data collection will be in the form of a questionnaire that will be crafted and passed out to random students that have time to complete it while with the giver of the questionnaire. Also, there will be flyers posted to let students know of certain dates and times that are also open for them to come and participate in the study as well. The goal is to collect the data for as many students as possible so that there is validity to the study. The survey goal is to achieve an N of at least 50 with a preferred N of 75-100.

Outcomes

The outcomes of this information will be the answers to the survey questions. The questions are then going to be analyzed and broken down along the information they are giving to assess the overall areas in which students viewed the issues of drug use and drug decriminalization. The assessment will be a simple tabulation of the data and analysis to see the average answers that are given to the most pertinent questions. In a secondary manner other variables will also be looked at such as gender as well as exact age. These however are not going to be assessed for statistical significance as far as correlation goes. Instead, they can stand in as additional useful data that can add to future considerations of studies.

Analysis

The research question here looks at the manner in which there is a connection between perceptions of people as it relates to their age and their enrollment in college. I hypothesize that students will be liberal in their views on the issue of drug usage as well as drugs being made legal. There are many factors that may affect this and the questions in the survey will attempt to assess some of these. These issues will be the exact age of the individual; the gender of the individual as well as things like political leaning. However, the overall goal is to assert that generally speaking the attitudes towards drug use are in general going to be positive and understanding as opposed to any high level of negative responses.

There are of course going to limitations to this approach. Firstly, the questionnaire method may be intimidating for some and truly honest answers may not be gotten. Also, there is the possibility that there will not be sufficient numbers in terms of the total N that is going to be utilized in the end. While this research will also allow me to assess the general feelings towards drug usage, there will not be a detailed set of finer explanations assessed. This leaves gaps in terms of really being able to understand the question of attitudes towards drug use. Even though there are going to be questions that can potentially be used to define the correlation between some variables like political self-identification or gender and attitudes towards drug use, these are not the actual research questions goals. While this is the reality for the research goals, it can be a limitation because it may be overlooking relevant narrow information for the sake of sticking to the broader subject at hand.