Research Proposal on Marijuana

Research Proposal

I chose drugs for my topic of my first research paper. I decided that it was to broad of a topic so I broke it down to just one of many drugs, marijuana. I want to find out how it controls people's lives and how it changes or controls the way they think. The group that I plan to target was college students but considering I attend IUP, I decided to just focus my research on IUP students. I would like to find out many different things about marijuana, except I haven't narrowed any of them down to exactly what I will put into my research paper.

First I would like to find out how many students actually smoke marijuana to how many that do not, and if not do they do any other kinds of drugs. I want to know if more males or females smoke it, when they started, how they get it, and how they get the money to keep it up. I also want to look into if people smoke it everyday, just once in a while, or just at social functions such as parties. Some other factors I would like to explore would be if the smoker maintains the same life as before they did the drug. Lastly, I would like to if there are any short and/or long term effects from doing the drug. For my primary research I will be making a survey and handing it out to many different IUP students around campus. I will also be observing people actually smoking marijuana and interviewing one or two marijuana users.

I feel that by distributing a survey to students it will give me answers to most of my questions. The survey will not require the students name so I feel that most of them will tell the truth, except for few. By observing people actually smoking it, I will learn what is involved, and I can ask many different questions in helping my research. I feel that there is only a couple limitations such as people will lie on the survey, they may feel uncomfortable with someone taking notes on them smoking the drug, and I might not be able to give the survey out to the right students that take part in the use of the drug. I feel that I can overcome one of the limitations and give out the survey on different days, make out different questions if I don't get the results that I expect and also make more surveys to cover most of the IUP population. I feel that the way I am approaching my topic is the best way and I will get exceptionally results to make my research paper better.

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