Essaybay stars are the easiest and quickest way to compare writers on EssayBay! The higher the rating a user gets, and the more constant that high rating is, the
more stars they will recieve, making it easy for you to see which writers turn out top quality work every time!
Note:
This total includes references and bibliography.
Deadline
05 December 2007
You Must Be Logged In To View Projects!
To view the full project, or to create projects, you must be logged in. To login as a freelancer click Here. To login as a buyer, click Here.
Description
The purpose of this assignment is to directly involve you in an investigation of a particular aspect of the subject matter in this course. After you complete this assignment, you will have more competence in the subject you have chosen, use of research methods, writing, and presenting.
Step 1
Choose a topic that is connected with this course and is of interest to you. The more interesting the topic you choose, the more interesting and rewarding the assignment will be for you. Once you have a topic, turn it into a specific research question. For example, if you select attitudes about adoption as your topic, then your research question could be:
How do social factors (e.g., gender, race, education, etc.) affect attitudes about adoption?
Step 2
Once you formulate your research question, search the available library sources for sociological books and/or peer-reviewed journal articles on your topic ("attitudes" and "adoption" could be the initial key words in the hypothetical search). Once you get a list of sources (they should be automatically sorted by their relevance to the key words you entered), you should evaluate them - read their abstracts, if available, and decide whether they provide information pertinent to your research question. If they do, you should then read them more thoroughly. .
Step 3
After becoming familiar with the arguments presented in the books and/or articles you have found, you should plan and set up your interviews (or observations), including composing interview questions and selecting your interviewee. Find people who you think are qualified to answer your questions. (You probably wouldn't want to interview someone who has not been married about conflict in marriage unless, of course, you wanted to hear the views of a priest, marriage therapist, etc.) In your interview, avoid asking closed and leading questions, because you will not learn much in response and/or the information you obtain may not be very accurate. "Do you think that adoption is wrong?" would not be a very good question. It is better to ask open questions: "How do you feel about adoption?" Ask as many questions as you need to learn about your topic. Take a notebook and a pen with you and remember to write down the answers before you forget them.
Step 4
In this step, it is time to analyze your data and write up your findings. Your paper should have the following seven parts:
• Introduction: What is your research question? What are your hypotheses? (Discuss what you had expected to find before you conducted your research.) For example, in the hypothetical research on attitudes about adoption, one of the hypotheses could be that women have more favorable attitudes toward adoption than men. You also have to explain why you hypothesize the way you do - e.g., Why do you think that women have more favorable attitudes toward adoption than men?
• Literature review: What did you learn about your research topic from the literature you found? (You should only discuss literature that is relevant to your research.)
• Methods and Data. Discuss the research process. What method did you use? Why did you choose this method? If you conducted interviews, how did you select your interviewees? (You may want to provide the demographic profile of your interviewees - their gender, age, race, etc.) If you were a participant or non participant observer, how did you select your research site? How many interviews did you conduct/how long did your observations last?
• Findings: What are your findings? What did you learn about your research topic from the interviews/observations?
• Discussion: Do the data you gathered in the interview support or refute the arguments presented in the literature you reviewed? Do they support or refute your original hypotheses? If they do not support the arguments presented in the literature and/or your hypotheses, think about possible explanations. Be creative and critical in your analysis and discussion!
• Conclusion: recapture your main findings. What did you learn in this research?
What are the implications of your findings? How could other researchers or policy-makers use them?
• Bibliography
This paper should be typed, double-spaced, using 11-12 point type and Times New Roman font. Paragraphs should be indented with no extra double spacing between them.
Try to Avoid:
Long quotes
Irrelevant quotes and examples (don't dwell on points that are interesting but inessential for you argument)
Passive voice
Very long sentences
Step 5
The final step of this assignment will be an in-class presentation of your findings. Your presentation should take 5-7 minutes and it should highlight the most important findings of your research. You should also compare and contrast the literature you have reviewed with the data you collected in your interview.
RSS Feeds
Buyers
Writers
EssayBay
EssayBay Stars