Honors Program

Majors desiring to be a candidate for honors in anthropology must apply in writing to the department at the beginning of the fall semester of the senior year.  

Purpose of the Honors Thesis

The purpose of the honors thesis is to develop the independent research and writing skills of majors by enabling you to (1) design and implement an anthropological project of your own choosing, (2) gain experience in carrying out a larger project, and (3) to familiarize yourself with issues and writing at an advanced level in your area of principal interest.

If you have questions or would like additional information about the Anthropology Honors Program, please contact Prof. Cho at hecho@davidson.edu.

Honors Thesis Committee

Before submitting a thesis proposal, you should identify an adviser for your thesis. This must be a current member of the department and need not be your major adviser. As soon as possible, another department member should be asked to be the second reader, though not necessarily before the proposal is submitted. You may also, in consultation with your thesis adviser, invite the participation of a third reader, who may be from outside the department.

You and your thesis adviser will meet on a regular basis, and the adviser will read and comment on preliminary drafts. The reader(s) will also read at least one of the preliminary drafts and provide comments before the scheduled defense. 

More information can be found in the College Catalog.

Thesis Proposal Writing Guide

The thesis proposal is an opportunity for you to tell your thesis adviser about what you plan to research and how you will conduct the research. The proposal should be as specific as possible about what it is that you hope to accomplish, as well as demonstrate that your plans are feasible. In the end, writing a thesis proposal helps you stay organized and focused. There is no fixed format for the proposal, but it consists of at least five elements:

Title Thinking about a title helps you make more concrete the parameters of the thesis and helps to convey your project to the reader.

Statement of the Problem (hypothesis or research question, literature review) This is one of the main features of the proposal, and could be a thesis statement, the hypothesis, or a summary of your research questions. The subject of the research should be phrased in the form of a strong statement that specifies to the reader what you will examine. For example, the statement, “Title IX has shaped conceptions of gender in American society” is OK, but put into a form of a testable hypothesis would be even stronger: “The implementation of Title IX to collegiate sports has redefined American conceptions of femininity.” The difference is in the specificity – college sports narrows the field down, gender has been focused to something that can possibly be measured (conceptions of femininity), etc.

For the literature review relevant to the statement of the problem, you should be able to situate your research project in the wider discourse. You will need to have read some previous scholarship on the topic and the sources that you plan to use. This may take the form of a standard review of the literature and should include theoretical writings that will help you frame your own thinking. What is the previous scholarship on the topic? In your opinion, what works are most important to your topic? How will these inform your research? This review need not be exhaustive at this point, nor is it expected that you have read them all completely, but you should have some general sense of the scholarship in your area.

Methods (how you will answer your research question and support your argument) Even if your research is based on library research, every research project has a methodology – the way that the researcher plans to answer the research question. In this section, you will spell out that plan – and yes, it’s understood that you have not finished the research yet and that things may change. How will you go about your research, both generally and specifically? How will you connect specific questions with specific methods? You should have a sense of how you can measure “conceptions of femininity,” using the example above, in that your data may include pictures of women in magazines, women’s roles in movies, increased availability and variety of exercising equipment or clothing for women, etc.

Timeline The timetable of the steps toward completing the thesis over two semesters should be in consultation with your thesis adviser. It should serve as a reminder to you for staying on track, especially if your data gathering includes methods other than library research.

Bibliography This is another key part of the proposal that will help keep track of your different sources and also shows what work you’ve done so far. It should be thorough and not padded, though not exhaustive as it’ll be a work in progress. Put it in the proper citation format so that you can save time when you submit the actual thesis since you already have most of your bibliography written out already.

The length of the proposal need not be more than 4~6 double-spaced pages, plus a bibliography. The thesis proposal is not something set in stone; think about it as a work in progress, a thought exercise. The goal of writing the thesis proposal is to give you more focus in the research; it is not to set the focus of your research. Most research plans change for a variety of reasons – not enough data, problems in coordinating fieldwork, the data is telling you something else is more relevant – so don’t worry about it as you write the proposal. Just be specific in both your thesis and your methods and do a good job compiling a bibliography.