term paper
INDIVIDUAL JOURNAL ARTICLE For the individual part of the Term Paper, you will need to find a source that has to be a scholarly article that addresses your groups topic. This article can be a report of an empirical study (quantitative or qualitative), a systematic review, or a meta-analysis.The following gives you some guidance on how to analyze the paper for the assignment. You do not have to follow this template slavishly and some points might not apply to the paper you chose for the assignment. The overall goal is that the reader of your summary gets a very good idea of the content of the paper. With regard to details, it is important to strike a balance between being too general and too specific. For instance, when you describe the methods in a study you should not mention minor details such as an incentive handed out to the participants. Do not write the summary as an essay about the topic (e.g., there is no thesis you are defending) and do not write this up as a list (i.e., it needs to be a coherent text and cannot be point-form). You can use the following questions to structure your text. The content and structure of your summary depends on the kind of paper you are summarizing. Given that most of you will summarize an empirical paper that reports the results of a single study I will focus on this kind of source first. I will then add some information about meta-analyses and systematic reviews.I) Empirical paper:In a nutshell, your summary needs to cover the questions and rationale of the study (this includes the literature review), the theoretical and methodological approach taken (e.g., based on Banduras social learning theory; an experiment), the results, and how the authors interpret the results. These topics need to be covered. Here are some more specific questions: 1. What are the goals / research questions of this study? This information you can find in the Introduction of the paper. 2. Describe the rationale for the study (e.g., what is known from previous research, what is not known or controversial, what is the theory behind the study). This information you can find in the Introduction of the paper.3. If this is possible, identify the philosophical assumptions behind the research (what we discussed in class, such as mechanistic versus organismic). All sections of a paper are pertinent to this issue, particularly the Introduction, Methods, and Discussion sections. A specific theory (e.g., Banduras social learning theory) is not a philosophical assumption.
4. What are the independent and dependent variables. This information you can find in the Introduction and also in Methods and Results). This might not apply, for instance for a qualitative study.5. What are the hypotheses? This might not apply, for instance for a qualitative study.6. What is the design of the study? Qualitative, quantitative, mixed methodCorrelational, experimentalLongitudinal, cross-sectionalThis information you can find in the Methods section of the paper.7. Describe the sample Population (e.g., high school/undergraduate students, married couples, Martians, parents, divorced couples, victims of domestic violence). Demographic characteristics (e.g., age, sex, race, educational level, income, length of relationship). Size of the sample? This information you can find in the Methods section of the paper.8. Instruments and procedures of the study Questionnaire, tests, experimental proceduresThis information you can find in the Methods section of the paper.9. List significant findings from the study. This information you can find in the Results section of the paper. Do not get caught up in details; report the gist of the results.10. How did the authors interpret their findings?This information you can find in the Discussion section of the paper.9. Limitations of this study. Explain why these issues impact the findings. 10. Strengths of this study. Explain why these issues strengthen or give validity to the findings. 11. What are the implications of the study for professional practice? For the questions 9-11 you can summarize what the authors say about these issues and what you think about these issues.II) Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses
A systematic review is like a major literature review. It answers a defined research question by collecting and summarizing as comprehensively as possible empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria (e.g., design of the study). This means that a systematic review is not an empirical study; it is a comprehensive summary and evaluation of what we know from existing empirical studies. Systematic reviews are written in a narrative style (e.g., There is strong empirical support for the notion …).A meta-analysis is the use of statistical methods to combine and summarize the results of many empirical studies. Meta-analyses also summarize results in a narrative style, but they always include tables and stats. Often, papers include a meta-analysis and systematic review.If this is only a systematic review, then typically the sections of the paper look different from an empirical paper. Systematic reviews are usually organized around questions and topics (What do we know about the impact of A on B, of A on C, etc.)A number of the questions listed above also apply to a systematic review/meta-analysis. For instance:1. What are the goals / research questions of the review/m-a? This information you can find in the Introduction of the paper. 2. Describe the rationale for the review/m-a (e.g., there is a controversy about a treatment method). This information you can find in the Introduction of the paper.3. If this is possible, identify the philosophical assumptions behind the review/m-a (what we discussed in class, such as mechanistic versus organismic). This task is often more difficult when you deal with a review/m-a (the assumptions are often more hidden).4. How do the authors interpret the evidence (the difference here is that a review/m-a does not interpret the results from a single study; it is about the big picture)?But there are also differences. For instance, reviews/m-a usually do not have explicit hypotheses or one explicit theory. The Methods section is also different. The design question is rather simple: a systematic review has no design and a m-a is a m-a (you dont have to go into details here). One methodological question for reviews is how they found their information and what kind of evidence they included (this is not always evident and/or explicit). M-a are usually very explicit on this issue and you should mention this issue in your summary (but no details). Other issues are rather obvious: a review paper has no sample-size (but a m-a tells you have many studies were included and what the combined number of participants was). The best way to summarize a review/m-a is the following:1) What is the question, rationale, etc.2) MethodsFor instance:
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