1. Components of
Project Design
MPA Integrative Capstone
Presidio Graduate School

2. Creative Foundation: Why and
What?
 Burning Interests, Big Ideas: What brought you
to Presidio? What kinds of changes do you feel
most strongly about making?
 Purposes: What do you want to get out of the
experience of doing the Capstone project?
How do you hope it will leverage your next
steps?
 Grounding: What areas of practice or contexts
of changemaking are most interesting or
compelling as the ground for exploring your big
ideas? At the end of the day, who or what
matters the most to you to make a difference
to?

3. Basic Components of Project
Design
1. Purposes
2. Conceptual framework
3. Actionable questions
4. Approach
Adapted from Maxwell, Joseph, Qualitative Research Design: An
Interactive Approach (Sage Publications)

4. Interactive design process
•Methods
•Activities
•Product
•Questions that
will be
answered
•Theory
•Practice
•Problem/Need
•Significance
•Influence
Purposes
Conceptual
framework
Approach
Actionable
Questions

5. Purposes
 What issues do you care most about?
 What practices and policies do you want
it to influence?
 What will it allow you to do next?
 Who would you like to benefit from the
results?

6. Conceptual Framework
 What do you think is going on with the issues,
people, settings, etc. that you plan to address
in your project? (problem statement)
 What theories, insights from practice, or
research findings inform and guide your
project?
 What literature and practical experiences will
you draw on for understanding the issues you
are studying/addressing in your project?

7. Actionable Questions
 What specific questions will your project
address?
 How are these questions related to one
another?

8. Approach
What will you actually do to address
the actionable questions?
What will you do to create a
“practice product”?

9. Relationships among the
components
 Actionable questions have a clear relationship to
goals.
 Research questions arise from the conceptual
framework.
 Goals and questions guide what theory, research,
and insights from practice are relevant.
 The approach allows you to address the questions;
the questions reflect the kind of knowledge that
your approach is capable of generating.
 The goals will shape the approach, and the
approach will constrain the goals.