Research committees reject proposals for three reasons: a vague literature gap that makes the project seem unfeasible, data access problems or unrealistic collection timelines, and methods that don't match the research questions.
Are there any red flag topics in my proposal that might trigger heavy committee pushback?
There are a number of things that are going to trigger pushback. One, if you have not identified the gap in your literature and you have not identified it narrowly enough, the committee is going to say, well, this is not doable, you do not have a gap. If you do not have access to data or if the data collection is going to take too long, another thing that committees are going to push back on. Or if you do not have a methodology that matches and allows you to answer your questions. And then they're just saying, well, you can't answer this question with this methodology, or this data that you're collecting won't allow you to answer this question. So there's where you're going to get most of your pushback.
