Research Plan: let's start saving the cats!

This week, in class, we talked about our own "big problem" how we should refine its definition and the aspect of it that we want to solve.

For what concerns my problem, I understood that the possible solution for it would be beneficial not only to my city, Milan, but to all Italy; so I decided to broaden my definition to the entire Country. The definition of my big problem is: to decrease the number of older cats (> 5 years old) currently located in cats pounds in Italy in favor of adoption.

There is also another issue that was raised during class: is there a reason, apart from a moral one, why this problem should be solved? For example, is this going to help the city where the pound is located, so that its financial contribution is going to be decreased? 

I actually don't know if this is a possible consequence of the resolution, because I'm not sure about what kind of connection there is between pounds and municipality. This is something that I need to discover during my research, and that is why I need a research plan in order to organize my time and my work.

I think that for my problem I need both a primary and secondary research. For next week, I'm going to look into previous work about this topic, if someone tried to actually solve this problem in the past. Then, for my primary research, I need to do two things: 

• a survey to understand the behavior of a person towards this issue, conducted through Facebook and other social media, 
• another survey addressed to cats pounds in order to understand what is the real situation regarding this issue. Of course, since I'm taking into consideration the entire Country, I have to choose pounds located in different area, and so I have to do first a research and then pick some of them. 

For the primary research, I think it is going to take more time, especially because I have to take into consideration the possibility that someone might not answer my questions, and in that case I have to consider another pounds; so it is going to take, I think, 3-4 weeks on average.