MEMO

June 22, 2021

To: Doctor Mira Alameddine

From:

 Rami Assaf
 Omar Abdallah
 Ali Abdallah
 Mohammad Saad

Subject: Progress Report on the Research Paper Proposal

This report summarizes the progress made by my team on the research paper proposal “strategies to
secure women's equal chances and safety at work” since May 15. This proposal will discuss the necessity
of developing strategies to protect women from a wide range of harassment at workplace, particularly
sexual harassment, in Lebanon; it will also discuss how developing these policies would affect women in
their personal and professional lives. Although our work is progressing satisfactorily, we have
experienced some problems in gathering information from protestors and from credible sources. This
report covers the progress of the research proposal required in English 217. This report covers the work
that was started in May 31 until June 28.

Our Progress During the Past Five Weeks

-During the past five weeks, we first addressed essential rules and regulations. Then we intended to
identify all of the components of our research proposal, from subject selection through theme
development. Following that, we intended to gather and summarize data for the literature review.
Furthermore, we decided to hold team meetings at least twice a week to debate the scope and eventually
prepare the literature review. We successfully chose the topic and identified all of the aspects such as the
objective, problem, and technique that would be used to finish the research proposal based on our team's
discussion and study, and then we created the research questions. and generated the topics according to
the work plan. Then we were able to collect a large number of secondary sources separately and
summarize them all in order to have all of the major concepts and components of the literature review.
However, due to number of technological issues, we were unable to attend all of the team meetings, so we
had difficulty debating the scope and the drafting of the literature review was a little delayed.

- Due to the pandemic, we weren’t able to meet with each other. So, we use the Microsoft Teams to meet
online. Despite the fact that we faced a lot of internet connection problems ana electricity cut-off, the
team members are from different departments. This causes difficulties in finding and managing the best
time to work together. But the hole team members were self-disciplined and understanding. So, this helps
in organizing and dividing the work into a small task. Every member was said to do a specific task and
this create a balance between finishing the required tasks at time and minding every member’s own tasks.
Moreover, there were some worries in finding reliable sources and finding enough data. The fact that
there weren’t enough sources is that most of the resources talked about the impact of harassing women in
the workplace, where the main point of our proposal is to find solutions and take actions against such
action. But with the help of a professional interviewers and special websites, we find decent information
that pushed us to write about the topic and go deeper.

Progress to be covered:

-The following steps will cover many tasks. First to organize with professional interviewers in order to
get more credible details about the issue and how it can be solved from his/her experience and
perspective. Then, after obtaining input on the data collection instruments, we will begin collecting our
primary data. After getting satisfied from the data collected, we will start drafting the proposal using our
own language and perspective. More-often the remaining steps for drafting is the methodology,
implicating and contributing to knowledge. In the methodology, we are going to talk about Research type,
Population and sample, Research methods, and practicalities. Moreover, the conclusion and
recommendation must be written at the end. Finally, the Abstract will be written to sum up the hole
proposal.

- We might find some problems when cooperating with the interviewers. Since the presence of the
pandemic, it is impossible to meet him face to face. So, we might use Microsoft Teams to do so. Hence,
Internet poor connection and electricity cut-off might be an obstacle. But using other internet alternatives
like 4g, we might be able to manage and cooperate between the members at once and with the
interviewers at another.

Selection of the Elements of the Research Proposal

After extensive study, we determined that the theme of the research proposal should be about developing
ways to protect women from a wide spectrum of workplace harassment. Then we determined the
problem, goal, and context of the topic: we determined that the problem is the excessive unwanted bad
and monotonous act mixed with sexual connotation that creates an abuse of the body, privacy, or
emotions, which occurs in the workplace between employers and managers, young and old people, but
the main victims are women. The goal is to develop solutions that will help in the maintaining of a safe
working environment for all employees, particularly women, that will benefit both their personal and
professional lives. Then we agreed on the methodology of collecting data for the research: primary and
secondary data and the mixed method design based on qualitative and quantitative approaches. We
constructed the research questions and derived the themes. Moreover, we collected all the secondary
sources necessary, then summarized and paraphrased them so we can compose the literature review.

Team Conferencing and Drafting the Literature Review

We agreed to make team conferences online on regular basis via Teams, minimum twice a week, and we
even tried to meet up in person occasionally. We were able to discuss many things in those conferences:
mainly deciding what resources to use, discussing the scope and finally drafting the literature review.