7024	Assessment
Abstract	Okay.
Research Question	The general research interest is clear, but the specific research questions not so much.  Try to create a simple, single sentence statement of the central research problem.
Literature Review	This is a good literature review, well organized, broad in coverage, clearly linked to the proposed research agenda.  One relevant question that seems overlooked by the literature review concerns the relationship between attitudes and actions.  It could usefully review some work that considers how much attitudes towards immigrants (as measured by surveys) reflect peoples' real-world behavior towards immigrants.  Although this is not the subject of the  proposed research, most readers will infer that the value of the research depends on the assumption that attitudes at least mirror people's behavior (or, more strongly, influence or guide that behavior).  Addressing the legitimacy of this assumption could help give weight to the value of this project. We should note that whether or not the dominant national values perspective is analytically sensible is a rather contentious issue among scholars.  Still, a good number of scholars and publications do consider it worthwhile, so it is a legitimate departure point for the proposal.
Data	Overall, the data seem appropriate and practical for the proposed project. It is not apparent why the proposal suggests it will assign each nation an "appropriate number" based on the Inglehart-Welzel cultural map.  A more obvious approach would be to use the two principal I-W scales and an interaction variable based on their product.  If there is some reason for representing the two scales as one unified scale, the proposal should make it clear. It is not obvious what the draft proposal means by saying the research will "conduct a stratified random sample of respondents" from these data.  From what else is stated, part of the idea is to select a subset of the nations including in the data.  It is not self-evident why.  The proposal also suggests that the research will select only citizens, but this seems inconsistent with the section that offers hypotheses about differences in attitudes between citizens and non-citizens.  Aside from the possibility that the size of the dataset is awkward, no reasons are offered for not including all the respondents from those nations that are used in the study.  If there is a good reason, the proposal should clarify and defend it. For national economic indicators, the research design could consider some that could offer more signs of economic stress, beyond the GDP, such as national unemployment or changes in GDP (to capture recessions).  The draft proposal suggests that the national values scores of the World Values Survey do not represent a simple aggregate of individual respondents’ recorded values.  The proposal should indicate how they calculate the scores in the final draft.
Causal Interpretations	This project involves two levels of causal processes affecting individuals, one being the characteristics that vary by individual biographies and circumstances, the other being the national conditions that have a presumed common effect on all in a country.  The principal underlying research design is not clearly and directly stated.  It appears to be to discover if national conditions have effects that cause the overall distribution of attitudes within countries (caused by individual level varying causes) to look different across countries, presumably in the central moments (averages).  In essence, this explanatory goal is built on two assumptions.  The first is that aggregate differences across countries are not due to compositional differences, they do not result simply from differing distributions of individual characteristics (such as income or religion or experience of historical hardships like war).  The second is that the aggregated differences can be explained by some national characteristics that essentially distinguish the experience of all people in one nation from those in another.  These assumptions are both difficult to demonstrate, but they should be kept clearly in mind as it is easy to lose tract of them behind explanatory rhetoric. Past research suggests that attitudes towards immigrants vary for different kinds of immigrants (e.g., high skilled vs. low skilled, or the racial or ethnic identity associated with immigrants).  This implies a potential issue with unmeasured variations in context.  For example, if people in countries receiving mainly high-skilled immigrants think about high-skilled immigrants when they answer the survey question, their responses mean something different than respondents who are thinking about low-skilled immigrants when they answer the survey question.   More generally, the extensive variation in immigration experiences across nations - including the magnitude of immigration as well as the characteristics of immigrants - unavoidably implies that the cultural references available to respondents describing their attitudes on immigrants will also vary widely.  (This could, however be seen as an opportunity, as one could seek to incorporate data from other sources on the characteristics of immigration patterns.) Be wary of trying to explain one individual level attitude (such as feelings about immigration) with other individual attitudes (such as trust of others).  When we step back to think about it, we can see that it is difficult to propose a mechanism by which one attitude can cause another attitude.  Attitudes do not do things to other attitudes in our cognitive processing.  When people talk about some attitudes causing others they are commonly weaving imaginative tales based on the apparent moral and logical relationships between attitudes.  It could be interesting to look at what can be found using indicators of national social conditions in contrast to the national values.  For example, the project could use one of the established indices of national gender inequality.  There are also indices of national conditions like democracy.  There is no need to go down this road, it just might be interesting.
Research Value	To strengthen the statement of the research value, try to be more specific about the ways that the proposed project will provide knowledge absent from past research.  This does not need to be a list of many possibilities, but at least one way that is sufficient to justify the research effort.
Timetable	The timetable seems fine, although it may get thrown off by unexpected difficulties analyzing this potentially complex data.
Citations & Biblio	The reference structure is fine.  It appears some citations may not appear in the bibliography.
Quality of writing	Very good.
Priorities for Revising for Final Draft	Overall, this proposal is developing well.  For the next iteration, you might stress clarifying exactly what data will be used, how the national and individual level characteristics will be analyzed together, and what are the principal causal assumptions and expectations at stake.
Miscellaneous Notes	The draft proposal states that if the research does not find significant regression coefficients, it will mean that “in reality, the variables have a negligible effect on one another.” A small point, but remember that operationalized variables do not really exist “in reality” — they are approximations of concepts.