RESEARCH PAPER GUIDELINES -
You must submit your paper in Canvas.
There is a standard format for all research papers. Below I have outlined the format and explained the steps necessary for a “good” paper for this class. Borrowing from Trinity College and Pierce College, I have excerpted some key points to be mindful of.
The structure of the research paper reflects the profound relationship between theory and fact. Facts do not speak for themselves. As Marvin Harris (Cultural Materialism 1979) observed, “facts are always unreliable without theories that guide their collection and that distinguish between superficial and significant appearances.” On the other hand, theories without facts are meaningless. The premise of science is the authority of experiment and observation over reason, ideology, and intuition.
Finally, it’s worth stressing that the evaluation of your paper will never be determined by whether or not your hypotheses are verified. It is important to remember that a hypothesis supported by the data does not mean that it is true as there conceivably are an infinite number of other theories that lead to the same prediction. Similarly, failure of support does not necessarily mean that your hypothesis is wrong: it may hold true in some populations, you may have incorrectly measured your theory’s concepts; your sampling may be flawed, etc.
Title Page
Abstract
Introduction
Review of the literature Method
Design
Analysis & Findings References
Research Paper Format
REMEMBER, YOU ARE USING APA FORMAT TO CONSTRUCT YOUR RESEARCH PAPER Each of the sections above is separate. Do not let the sections run into each other
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TITLE PAGE
The first page of your research paper is the title page. While all of the pages of your research paper will be formatted in APA or ASA style, so is the title page. Below is an example of a perfect title page:
Underage Drinking
Running head: Underage Drinking
College Student’s Perceptions About Underage Drinking John Q. Student
AJ 319
Section 3197
Wed 3:45-6:55pm
Los Angeles Harbor College
Prof. Reid
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABSTRACT – How to write the abstract
An abstract is a one paragraph summary of your research project. Write your abstract after the rest of your paper is written. After all, how can you summarize something that is not yet written? Economy of words is important throughout any paper, but especially in an abstract. However, use complete sentences and do not sacrifice readability for brevity. You can keep it concise by working sentences so that they serve more than one purpose. Remember, an abstract is one paragraph.
And remember, you are using APA format.
Consider the following elements in your one paragraph abstract.
INTRODUCTION – Statement of the Problem/Hypothesis/Topic
In this section you are introducing your research paper and explaining what your topic/problem/hypothesis is. Your opening paragraph will be introductory and you will want to make sure you explain what your hypothesis or research is. You will also want to describe precisely what you, the researcher intends to prove or demonstrate from your research and why.
The introduction is also the section where you need to define terms or words specific to your research question. For example, if you are doing your research paper on video games and violence in adolescent male children, then you might need to explain what the different types of video games are and how they are played and with what game system/equipment, etc. You may also need to explain or define the historical background behind your research project; an example would be capital punishment. Or you may consider using a rich illustration of the phenomenon you are studying. Remember, a research paper is neither an essay nor a journalistic feature story. All assertions of fact must be documented. Be careful of any generalizations that you make. And strive to be value-free in your inquiry. A social science research paper is not an editorial piece where one espouses one’s own beliefs; it is a research process!!!!!!!
Should/Could be around 5-10 pages in length.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
A literature review is used to show that you have read, evaluated, and comprehended the published research on a particular topic. A literature review is structured to show your professor that you understand the work that has been done about your topic. To say it in another way, the literature review provides information about the research already conducted in this area. It is meant to set the stage for your own research. Using previous research, you will describe the phenomenon you want to study and what previous research tells us about it.
A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area utilizing the process of summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling of that information. For your literature review, you will use at least 5 scholarly articles/sources.
What are scholarly sources? That simply means that you will want to use research that goes through an academic review process. Scholarly journals are also called academic, peer-reviewed, or refereed journals. Strictly speaking, peer-reviewed (also called refereed) journals refer only to those scholarly journals that submit articles to several other scholars, experts, or academics (peers) in the field for review and comment. These reviewers must agree that the article represents properly conducted original research or writing before it can be published.
Scholarly journal articles often have an abstract, a descriptive summary of the article contents, before the main text of the article.
Scholarly journals generally have a sober, serious look. They often contain many graphs and charts but few glossy pages or exciting pictures.
Scholarly journals always cite their sources in the form of footnotes or bibliographies. These bibliographies are generally lengthy and cite other scholarly writings.
Articles are written by a scholar in the field or by someone who has done research in the field. The affiliations of the authors are listed, usually at the bottom of the first page or at the end of the article.
The main purpose of a scholarly journal is to report on original research or experimentation in order to make such information available to the rest of the scholarly world.
Many scholarly journals, though by no means all, are published by a specific professional organization.
MAKE SURE YOUR 5 SOURCES ARE SCHOLARLY!!!!!
Types of Periodicals
Scholarly Journals
Popular Magazines
Time
Newsweek
National Review Atlantic
Current events/hot topics
Commentaries on social/political
issues
Shorter articles Designed to
attract broad segment of population
Primary source for analysis of
popular culture Book reviews
Generally journalists
Freelance writers Sometimes
academics
Occasionally cite sources in text
Many graphics Photos
Full-page
advertisements
Bright, attractive
covers
Trade and Industry Journals
Examples;
Newspapers
New York Times Wall Street Journal Mobile Register
Christian Science Monitor
News stories Local and
regional focus Editorials Primary source
for information
on events
Advertising Age RN
Computer World HRMagazine Chronicle of Higher Education
Current trends, news, products
in a field
Provide information of use to a particular industry
Statistics, forecasts Organization, company information
Uses
Book and product reviews
Professors
Practitioners in the field
Authors
Sources
Information attributed to a
source, scant documentation
Pictures Charts Many advertisements
Occasionally cite sources in text
Photographs Graphs Charts Tables
Graphics
Strategies for writing the literature review
A literature (lit) review is not a report that summarizes relevant articles and books one by one sequentially. Rather, a lit review is a cohesive account of important bodies of works and arguments in Sociology or Criminology and the articles and books that are a part of these bodies of work and arguments. The trick is to choose the bodies of work that are most relevant to your project.
For example, if you were writing a paper that argues that violent video games are not nearly as dangerous as many feel they are, you could draw upon several bodies of literature. First, you might write about literature that argues that the dangers of violence in the media in general have been overstated.
As you summarize the literature, be careful that you're not just discussing each piece of writing in a vacuum. Relate each piece of research to the broader research question, and relate individual pieces of research to each other. Weave the arguments and findings of others into your own argument. Take extreme care to avoid over-generalization and be sure to document your statements of fact. Do not cite work that has no bearing on your argument. Be sure to define key concepts. Take for example the passage below in the case of euthanasia...notice how the above points are discussed:
Over the past two decades in the wake of the highly-publicized stories of Karen Ann Quinlin, Paul Murphy, Nancy Cruzan, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Hemlock Society, and the legalization of euthanasia in the Netherlands, researchers have increasingly investigated the determinants of Americans' attitudes toward physician-assisted suicides (or "homicides," according to the perspective of some) and individuals' "right to die." Over the past fifty years, national surveys of Americans (NORC 1947, 1972-98; Harris 1973, 1981) show consistently increasing support for active euthanasia. To what extent is this due to the supposedly increasing secularization and moral relativism of American culture (Bellah 1989)?
In their analysis of the determinants of the American death ethos, Kearl and Harris (1981) found religiosity and education to be two of the strongest predictors of attitudes toward abortion, suicide, and euthanasia. Religion preserves moral tradition, and many faiths believe that the sanctity of life should always be honored and never violated. Here we will test the proposition that the more religious individuals are the more likely they oppose physician-assisted deaths of the terminally ill. We further suspect that this relationship between religiosity and euthanasia attitudes is not uniform across the social landscape. In particular, because of the greater moral conservativism researchers (e.g., Argyle 1993; Nelson 1979) have found among those in the lower classes, we hypothesize that because of this dampening effect of social class that the influence of religiosity on euthanasia attitudes will be greater among those of the middle and upper classes than among those from the low and working classes.
One technique to use is to find common topics in all five pieces of your research. You are not just reviewing each piece of literature separately...you are weaving all five pieces of journal articles/scholarly research/books together, along with your predictions. Again, you are writing in the 3rd person, not first person. Make sure the first paragraph of your lit review mentions your hypothesis/research question.
Should/Could be at least 8-15 pages in length
How to find scholarly & academic research: Finding Journal Articles
Looking for scholarly or academic research articles? Ordinary search engines are great for researching business and popular culture, but they're not very useful for finding academic research papers or scholarly journal articles. Not to worry. These resources abound online and can be found using the tools listed below. Journal articles are available in a variety of formats ranging from citations or brief abstracts to full text delivered electronically or in hard copy. Some articles are provided free. Often, a fee is required, or access is restricted in some way. You may have some success locating journals via search engines or web directories. Check out the tools below or try the Google search above. Simply add the word journal or the phrase "electronic journal" to your search term. In directories, look under the discipline of criminal justice. Yahoo, for example, lists eleven journals under Science/Biology/Cell Biology and twelve under Arts/Humanities/Literature/Poetry. Academic information may also be available through the Internet's many library gateways.
Searchable Journal Articles - Google Scholar Musselman Library: Journals vs. Magazines InfoMine FindArticles.com MagPortal HighBeam Ingenta Eric Database Periodicals.Net SciBase InfoTrieve Stanford University Columbia University e-Guides NewJour GoldRush AllAcademic JournalSeek JSTOR Project Muse Journals UNCG JournalFinder WorldCAT Pinakes Launchpad (multi-disciplinary) Silver Platter National Academy Press SearchEbooks SearchEdu Canada Institute for Scientific & Technical Info Jake
Science and Medicine - BioMedNet MedBioWord: Science & Medical Journals & Databases Yale Medical Journal Search The Lancet Medical Journal Search New England Journal of Medicine Medical Matrix SciCentral Scirus Medsite Journal Manager National Library of Medicine ScienceResearch.com
Any other website that is not listed above is probably not a scholarly/research based site. If you are unsure, bring your article(s) to me for approval. You may also use books as well.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
METHOD
For this section you need to describe how you administered your instrument/survey, when and how, and to how many, and in what form.
For example: In researching the topic “college students perception of video games and violence”, a 50-question survey was administered in AJ 319 – Research and Statistics in Criminal Justice on Wednesday, May 9, 2012. 65 students completed the survey which asked a variety of questions regarding the topic. The surveys were administered anonymously.
Should/Could be 1 page in length
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DESIGN
Attach a copy of the survey instrument that you administered to your population (50 people at least). Behind that, attach another copy of your survey instrument with an explanation, after each question or several questions of the same type, explaining why you asked the questions you did and what you were hoping to learn or understand by asking that/those question(s).
Your survey instrument shall contain at least 15 questions. You must also use all of the following types of questions at least once in your survey instrument:
Dichotomous Questions - When a question has two possible responses, we consider it dichotomous. Surveys often use dichotomous questions that ask for a Yes/No, True/False or Agree/Disagree response.
Nominal Questions - We can also classify questions in terms of their level of measurement. For instance, we might measure occupation using a nominal question. Here, the number next to each response has no meaning except as a placeholder for that response. The choice of a "2" for a lawyer and a "1" for a truck driver is arbitrary -- from the numbering system used we can't infer that a lawyer is "twice" something more that a truck driver is.
Likert Scale – is when we construct survey questions that attempt to measure on an interval level. One of the most common of these types is the traditional 1-to-5 rating (or 1-to-7, or 1-to-9, etc.). Here we see how we might ask an opinion question on a 1-to-5 bipolar scale (it's called bipolar because there is a neutral point and the two ends of the scale are at opposite positions of the opinion):
Semantic Differential – is another type of interval question. Here the respondent is assessed on a set of bipolar adjective pairs using a 5-point rating scale:
Guttmann Scale – is another type of interval level measurement. Here the respondent checks each item with which they agree. The items themselves are constructed so that they are cumulative -- if you agree to one, you probably agree to all of the ones above it in the list
Filter or Contingency Questions - Sometimes you have to ask the respondent one question in order to determine if they are qualified or experienced enough to answer a subsequent one. For instance, you may want to ask one question if the respondent has ever smoked marijuana and a different question if they have not. In this case you would have to construct a filter or contingency question to determine whether they've ever smoked marijuana:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANALYSIS & FINDINGS
In this section your goal is to analyze the responses to your surveys. When you analyze the responses you are required to do more than just report back how many people answered yes to a question or how many people answered no to another question. The goal is to try to reach conclusions that extend beyond the immediate data alone. Feel free to make judgments about the probabilities you observe between different groups such as male versus female, ages difference, religious differences, etc. Or, maybe your analysis and findings will reveal that you should have asked a question that you didn’t think of? Make sure you include this in your narrative. It is okay to realize something after the fact.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REFERENCES – APA
Go to http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ for information on APA formatting. Go to http://www.calstatela.edu/library/guides/3asa.pdf for information on ASA formatting.
You must submit your paper in Canvas.
There is a standard format for all research papers. Below I have outlined the format and explained the steps necessary for a “good” paper for this class. Borrowing from Trinity College and Pierce College, I have excerpted some key points to be mindful of.
The structure of the research paper reflects the profound relationship between theory and fact. Facts do not speak for themselves. As Marvin Harris (Cultural Materialism 1979) observed, “facts are always unreliable without theories that guide their collection and that distinguish between superficial and significant appearances.” On the other hand, theories without facts are meaningless. The premise of science is the authority of experiment and observation over reason, ideology, and intuition.
Finally, it’s worth stressing that the evaluation of your paper will never be determined by whether or not your hypotheses are verified. It is important to remember that a hypothesis supported by the data does not mean that it is true as there conceivably are an infinite number of other theories that lead to the same prediction. Similarly, failure of support does not necessarily mean that your hypothesis is wrong: it may hold true in some populations, you may have incorrectly measured your theory’s concepts; your sampling may be flawed, etc.
Title Page
Abstract
Introduction
Review of the literature Method
Design
Analysis & Findings References
Research Paper Format
REMEMBER, YOU ARE USING APA FORMAT TO CONSTRUCT YOUR RESEARCH PAPER Each of the sections above is separate. Do not let the sections run into each other
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TITLE PAGE
The first page of your research paper is the title page. While all of the pages of your research paper will be formatted in APA or ASA style, so is the title page. Below is an example of a perfect title page:
Underage Drinking
Running head: Underage Drinking
College Student’s Perceptions About Underage Drinking John Q. Student
AJ 319
Section 3197
Wed 3:45-6:55pm
Los Angeles Harbor College
Prof. Reid
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABSTRACT – How to write the abstract
An abstract is a one paragraph summary of your research project. Write your abstract after the rest of your paper is written. After all, how can you summarize something that is not yet written? Economy of words is important throughout any paper, but especially in an abstract. However, use complete sentences and do not sacrifice readability for brevity. You can keep it concise by working sentences so that they serve more than one purpose. Remember, an abstract is one paragraph.
And remember, you are using APA format.
Consider the following elements in your one paragraph abstract.
- Purpose of the study – hypothesis, overall question, objective
- Be concise
- As a summary of work done, it is always written in the past tense and 3rd person
- An abstract should stand on its own and not refer to any other part of the paper
- Focus on summarizing results – limit background information to a sentence or two
- Spelling and format count
INTRODUCTION – Statement of the Problem/Hypothesis/Topic
In this section you are introducing your research paper and explaining what your topic/problem/hypothesis is. Your opening paragraph will be introductory and you will want to make sure you explain what your hypothesis or research is. You will also want to describe precisely what you, the researcher intends to prove or demonstrate from your research and why.
The introduction is also the section where you need to define terms or words specific to your research question. For example, if you are doing your research paper on video games and violence in adolescent male children, then you might need to explain what the different types of video games are and how they are played and with what game system/equipment, etc. You may also need to explain or define the historical background behind your research project; an example would be capital punishment. Or you may consider using a rich illustration of the phenomenon you are studying. Remember, a research paper is neither an essay nor a journalistic feature story. All assertions of fact must be documented. Be careful of any generalizations that you make. And strive to be value-free in your inquiry. A social science research paper is not an editorial piece where one espouses one’s own beliefs; it is a research process!!!!!!!
Should/Could be around 5-10 pages in length.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
A literature review is used to show that you have read, evaluated, and comprehended the published research on a particular topic. A literature review is structured to show your professor that you understand the work that has been done about your topic. To say it in another way, the literature review provides information about the research already conducted in this area. It is meant to set the stage for your own research. Using previous research, you will describe the phenomenon you want to study and what previous research tells us about it.
A literature review discusses published information in a particular subject area utilizing the process of summary and synthesis. A summary is a recap of the important information of the source, but a synthesis is a re-organization, or a reshuffling of that information. For your literature review, you will use at least 5 scholarly articles/sources.
What are scholarly sources? That simply means that you will want to use research that goes through an academic review process. Scholarly journals are also called academic, peer-reviewed, or refereed journals. Strictly speaking, peer-reviewed (also called refereed) journals refer only to those scholarly journals that submit articles to several other scholars, experts, or academics (peers) in the field for review and comment. These reviewers must agree that the article represents properly conducted original research or writing before it can be published.
Scholarly journal articles often have an abstract, a descriptive summary of the article contents, before the main text of the article.
Scholarly journals generally have a sober, serious look. They often contain many graphs and charts but few glossy pages or exciting pictures.
Scholarly journals always cite their sources in the form of footnotes or bibliographies. These bibliographies are generally lengthy and cite other scholarly writings.
Articles are written by a scholar in the field or by someone who has done research in the field. The affiliations of the authors are listed, usually at the bottom of the first page or at the end of the article.
The main purpose of a scholarly journal is to report on original research or experimentation in order to make such information available to the rest of the scholarly world.
Many scholarly journals, though by no means all, are published by a specific professional organization.
MAKE SURE YOUR 5 SOURCES ARE SCHOLARLY!!!!!
Types of Periodicals
Scholarly Journals
- Journal of Educational Research
- American Historical Review
- Social Psychology Quarterly
- BioScience
- Reports of original research
- In-depth analysis of topics
- Refereed or peer-reviewed
Intended for academic
audience - Lengthy articles
- Academic level book
reviews - Researchers
- Academics
Popular Magazines
Time
Newsweek
National Review Atlantic
Current events/hot topics
Commentaries on social/political
issues
Shorter articles Designed to
attract broad segment of population
Primary source for analysis of
popular culture Book reviews
Generally journalists
Freelance writers Sometimes
academics
Occasionally cite sources in text
Many graphics Photos
Full-page
advertisements
Bright, attractive
covers
Trade and Industry Journals
Examples;
Newspapers
New York Times Wall Street Journal Mobile Register
Christian Science Monitor
News stories Local and
regional focus Editorials Primary source
for information
on events
Advertising Age RN
Computer World HRMagazine Chronicle of Higher Education
Current trends, news, products
in a field
Provide information of use to a particular industry
Statistics, forecasts Organization, company information
Uses
Book and product reviews
Professors
- Scholars
- Extensive documentation
Footnotes - Bibliographies
- Usually signed
- Charts
- Formulas
- Graphs
Serious appearance - Few advertisements
Practitioners in the field
Authors
Sources
Information attributed to a
source, scant documentation
Pictures Charts Many advertisements
Occasionally cite sources in text
Photographs Graphs Charts Tables
Graphics
- Illustrations
- Targeted advertising
- Universities
- Scholarly presses
- Academic/research
organizations - Published monthly,
quarterly, semi- annually, or annually
- Commercial publishers
- Usually published weekly or
monthly
- Commercial publishers
- Professional or trade
associations - Frequency
varies
- Commercial publishers
- Daily or weekly
Strategies for writing the literature review
A literature (lit) review is not a report that summarizes relevant articles and books one by one sequentially. Rather, a lit review is a cohesive account of important bodies of works and arguments in Sociology or Criminology and the articles and books that are a part of these bodies of work and arguments. The trick is to choose the bodies of work that are most relevant to your project.
For example, if you were writing a paper that argues that violent video games are not nearly as dangerous as many feel they are, you could draw upon several bodies of literature. First, you might write about literature that argues that the dangers of violence in the media in general have been overstated.
As you summarize the literature, be careful that you're not just discussing each piece of writing in a vacuum. Relate each piece of research to the broader research question, and relate individual pieces of research to each other. Weave the arguments and findings of others into your own argument. Take extreme care to avoid over-generalization and be sure to document your statements of fact. Do not cite work that has no bearing on your argument. Be sure to define key concepts. Take for example the passage below in the case of euthanasia...notice how the above points are discussed:
Over the past two decades in the wake of the highly-publicized stories of Karen Ann Quinlin, Paul Murphy, Nancy Cruzan, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the Hemlock Society, and the legalization of euthanasia in the Netherlands, researchers have increasingly investigated the determinants of Americans' attitudes toward physician-assisted suicides (or "homicides," according to the perspective of some) and individuals' "right to die." Over the past fifty years, national surveys of Americans (NORC 1947, 1972-98; Harris 1973, 1981) show consistently increasing support for active euthanasia. To what extent is this due to the supposedly increasing secularization and moral relativism of American culture (Bellah 1989)?
In their analysis of the determinants of the American death ethos, Kearl and Harris (1981) found religiosity and education to be two of the strongest predictors of attitudes toward abortion, suicide, and euthanasia. Religion preserves moral tradition, and many faiths believe that the sanctity of life should always be honored and never violated. Here we will test the proposition that the more religious individuals are the more likely they oppose physician-assisted deaths of the terminally ill. We further suspect that this relationship between religiosity and euthanasia attitudes is not uniform across the social landscape. In particular, because of the greater moral conservativism researchers (e.g., Argyle 1993; Nelson 1979) have found among those in the lower classes, we hypothesize that because of this dampening effect of social class that the influence of religiosity on euthanasia attitudes will be greater among those of the middle and upper classes than among those from the low and working classes.
One technique to use is to find common topics in all five pieces of your research. You are not just reviewing each piece of literature separately...you are weaving all five pieces of journal articles/scholarly research/books together, along with your predictions. Again, you are writing in the 3rd person, not first person. Make sure the first paragraph of your lit review mentions your hypothesis/research question.
Should/Could be at least 8-15 pages in length
How to find scholarly & academic research: Finding Journal Articles
Looking for scholarly or academic research articles? Ordinary search engines are great for researching business and popular culture, but they're not very useful for finding academic research papers or scholarly journal articles. Not to worry. These resources abound online and can be found using the tools listed below. Journal articles are available in a variety of formats ranging from citations or brief abstracts to full text delivered electronically or in hard copy. Some articles are provided free. Often, a fee is required, or access is restricted in some way. You may have some success locating journals via search engines or web directories. Check out the tools below or try the Google search above. Simply add the word journal or the phrase "electronic journal" to your search term. In directories, look under the discipline of criminal justice. Yahoo, for example, lists eleven journals under Science/Biology/Cell Biology and twelve under Arts/Humanities/Literature/Poetry. Academic information may also be available through the Internet's many library gateways.
Searchable Journal Articles - Google Scholar Musselman Library: Journals vs. Magazines InfoMine FindArticles.com MagPortal HighBeam Ingenta Eric Database Periodicals.Net SciBase InfoTrieve Stanford University Columbia University e-Guides NewJour GoldRush AllAcademic JournalSeek JSTOR Project Muse Journals UNCG JournalFinder WorldCAT Pinakes Launchpad (multi-disciplinary) Silver Platter National Academy Press SearchEbooks SearchEdu Canada Institute for Scientific & Technical Info Jake
Science and Medicine - BioMedNet MedBioWord: Science & Medical Journals & Databases Yale Medical Journal Search The Lancet Medical Journal Search New England Journal of Medicine Medical Matrix SciCentral Scirus Medsite Journal Manager National Library of Medicine ScienceResearch.com
Any other website that is not listed above is probably not a scholarly/research based site. If you are unsure, bring your article(s) to me for approval. You may also use books as well.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
METHOD
For this section you need to describe how you administered your instrument/survey, when and how, and to how many, and in what form.
For example: In researching the topic “college students perception of video games and violence”, a 50-question survey was administered in AJ 319 – Research and Statistics in Criminal Justice on Wednesday, May 9, 2012. 65 students completed the survey which asked a variety of questions regarding the topic. The surveys were administered anonymously.
Should/Could be 1 page in length
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DESIGN
Attach a copy of the survey instrument that you administered to your population (50 people at least). Behind that, attach another copy of your survey instrument with an explanation, after each question or several questions of the same type, explaining why you asked the questions you did and what you were hoping to learn or understand by asking that/those question(s).
Your survey instrument shall contain at least 15 questions. You must also use all of the following types of questions at least once in your survey instrument:
Dichotomous Questions - When a question has two possible responses, we consider it dichotomous. Surveys often use dichotomous questions that ask for a Yes/No, True/False or Agree/Disagree response.
Nominal Questions - We can also classify questions in terms of their level of measurement. For instance, we might measure occupation using a nominal question. Here, the number next to each response has no meaning except as a placeholder for that response. The choice of a "2" for a lawyer and a "1" for a truck driver is arbitrary -- from the numbering system used we can't infer that a lawyer is "twice" something more that a truck driver is.
Likert Scale – is when we construct survey questions that attempt to measure on an interval level. One of the most common of these types is the traditional 1-to-5 rating (or 1-to-7, or 1-to-9, etc.). Here we see how we might ask an opinion question on a 1-to-5 bipolar scale (it's called bipolar because there is a neutral point and the two ends of the scale are at opposite positions of the opinion):
Semantic Differential – is another type of interval question. Here the respondent is assessed on a set of bipolar adjective pairs using a 5-point rating scale:
Guttmann Scale – is another type of interval level measurement. Here the respondent checks each item with which they agree. The items themselves are constructed so that they are cumulative -- if you agree to one, you probably agree to all of the ones above it in the list
Filter or Contingency Questions - Sometimes you have to ask the respondent one question in order to determine if they are qualified or experienced enough to answer a subsequent one. For instance, you may want to ask one question if the respondent has ever smoked marijuana and a different question if they have not. In this case you would have to construct a filter or contingency question to determine whether they've ever smoked marijuana:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANALYSIS & FINDINGS
In this section your goal is to analyze the responses to your surveys. When you analyze the responses you are required to do more than just report back how many people answered yes to a question or how many people answered no to another question. The goal is to try to reach conclusions that extend beyond the immediate data alone. Feel free to make judgments about the probabilities you observe between different groups such as male versus female, ages difference, religious differences, etc. Or, maybe your analysis and findings will reveal that you should have asked a question that you didn’t think of? Make sure you include this in your narrative. It is okay to realize something after the fact.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REFERENCES – APA
Go to http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ for information on APA formatting. Go to http://www.calstatela.edu/library/guides/3asa.pdf for information on ASA formatting.
