The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with how researchers apply the scientific method and then present their research.
Skills to be gained or honed include learning how to use a database to find articles in order to:
- Complete an assignment
- Answer a question you have about something
- Check information you read or hear to see if it is correct
Task
STEP ONE
Find a social science research article from an academic journal.
- The article needs to connect to social science.
- The topic of the article should be of interest to you.
- Find an article you understand overall, even if you don’t understand all the statistical analysis and such.
- Use the information in the Criteria section to help you more easily find an appropriate article.
STEP TWO
Using the research method steps page (also in the module) as a guide, find and write out the following from the article:
- The hypothesis (quantitative research) or problem to investigate/question to explore (qualitative research)
- The variables in the hypothesis or investigation
- The method(s) used to gather data (research design)
- How the variables were operationalized (measured)
- What the researcher(s) found and how the results were presented (tables, graphs, charts, writing)
- The conclusion of the study (results, implications, limits to the study, etc.)
- The reference for this article in APA format
- Each one of the points listed above can be a separate paragraph. Some paragraphs will be longer than others.
- Be sure to include enough information so that the purpose of the study, how the study was done, and the results of the study would be clear to anyone reading it, regardless of that person's familiarity with the research method.
- Use your own words in the descriptions. Quote the article only when that is the clearest way of conveying the information. Be sure to use quotation marks and a citation when you do.
- For more information on how to do APA formatting for the reference see the writing help resources page.
- If you use a citation/reference generator, be sure to compare it to appropriate formatting (Purdue OwlLinks to an external site. is one of my favorite sources for this) because the generators often get a part of the reference wrong.