A Research Proposal: The Effects of Restaurant Environment on Consumer Behavior, is an example of a research proposal that I choose to study and critique. I choose this one specifically because it related a lot to the project proposal that I have created. Both have to do with restaurants, and have subjects that aren’t often discussed in the work place.

This article wanted to find out whether the environment of a restaurant, including paint, decor, and seating, had any effect on the consumers and their likability of the restaurants. They planned to help future managers and owners, by learning what is best for a restaurant and what will bring more people back. This proposal included: an abstract, statement of the problem, background, data types, methods of data collection, and some form of analysis. This proposal seemed to have all of the six steps needed in creating a research project, and could possibly go somewhere with their research and finding answers.

I really liked reading this article, because it gave me ideas on how I should make my own research proposal much better. I will definitely use these ideas on my own revision. Providing a statement of the problem and a background is something I thought I could really use in my own project. They stated why we should even ask their question and why it can be important. With providing the background we could see what they already knew about the topic, and what has been already researched.

Something that I would suggest in changing with this proposal is their questionnaire and location. The questionnaire provided a lot about the restaurants environment and the customers likability to come back, but I felt that they should have asked what the customers would have liked to see in the restaurant environment or what they would like to change about the environment. I also felt as though they could have had more of a control over the restaurants that they tested, while they tested a variety of restaurants, I thought that maybe they should have tested one specific type of restaurant such as a diner, and tested other diners with different environments.

Overall, this proposal gave me more ideas on how to improve mine, as well as being able to see what a real proposal looks like.

“The Waitressing Life: The Honor of a Second-Class Profession” by Katie Van Syckle, is an article written by a waitress, discussing some of the things she encounters on a daily basis. These range from: how to talk to a customer, why might a restaurant not be running smooth, to how to wait in a high end restaurant versus a more casual eatery. This article was fairly short, so it only gave a brief look into the restaurant culture, however gave me more ideas as to what I might want a sub-topic to be in my research on restaurant culture.
If I choose this to be what I create a research project on for a class, I think I am settling with the server aspect of the restaurant. Before I was also curious about the back of the house and the customers and their role in the culture of restaurants, but I think I more want to study waitresses and the role they play.
This article made me think about asking the question, can servers live above poverty and comfortably with only this one job? She stated that often she receives this question, “So what do you do, other than, you know, waitressing?” This is a common question asked of servers, many believe that they either have another job, just trying to pay their selves through school, or that this is just a short stop onto bigger and better things. I as a server often hear this as well, luckily I go to school, and use that as a way to make sure the conversation doesn’t turn awkward if I wasn’t doing anything else with my life.
But, is waitressing really all that bad? Why do so many people look down on waitressing? And could someone truly live comfortably off of just working as a waitress their whole life? This is one thing I would like to research, what would be their necessary hours and tips made during a week, and how would it differ from state to state? This research topic would require a lot of background information and I would most likely need government information for each of the state’s laws for waitressing as well as finding out averages of how much a waitress makes versus how much it costs to live in each state.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/the-waitressing-life-the-honor-of-a-second-class-profession/244176/