Structure of Paper
The paper must have the following sections:
- Abstract: brief descriptions of the goals of the study, the techniques employed, findings, and recommendations. These must be brief.
- Introduction (don’t state title): background, purpose, and relevance of study
- Literature review (don’t state title)
- Method (Further discussed on page 2: population, sampling technique (cluster, random, snowball, convenience), techniques of data collection (survey or interview), techniques of data analyses (statistical: SPSS, or qualitative: grounded theory)
- Results
- Discussion
- Limitations and Future research
Content of Final Project
Tasks for the Completion of your Data Collection (These must be completed before you start writing your method, results, discussion, and limitations sections)
You need three research questions that I have to approve;
Submit survey questions that correspond to your approved research questions; Follow the format provided below on page 5.
You need at least 30 participants.
Content for the Discussion of your Method Section
Population: A brief discussion of the population from which you are selecting your sample.
Sampling techniques: Detailed description of how you selected your participants. Do all you can to avoid confusing simple random techniques with convenience sampling. You will lose points for that. State the sample size.
Data collection techniques: Detailed description of how you collected your data.
What were the main goals of the study? Here you discuss your research questions.
What techniques did you use to get the data? Interview, content analyses, or survey? Here, you might want to state some of the specific survey or interview questions you asked your participants.
Data analyses techniques: how did you analyze your data?
You need to discuss the SPSS and the kinds of tests you run if you conducted quantitative methods.
if you completed interviews or content analyses from news reports and documents, state that you will be using the grounded theory approach and focus on identifying specific themes and patterns from interviews. You must state specifically that you digitally recorded the interviews and transcribed them word for word.
How to Integrate your Data into the Results Section
Organize your results section into sub-sections using your research questions
For each of the subsections, you need to provide simple descriptive statistical analyses: frequency distributions; measures of central tendencies (Averages: mean, mode, median), and cross-tabulations. Use percentages to describe your table of contents, provide table headers, and be sure to state the questions somewhere in your description of the table content.
The following are the specific steps
o Run frequencies, measures of central tendencies (mean, mode, median), and crosstabs.
o Generate as many tables, graphs, and charts as possible, and use most of them.
o Take your time to describe in detail, the contents of each of your tables and charts. This will help you utilize the important data that you have.
o Number the tables, and provide your descriptions before or after the tables. In other words, I want you to have your tables in the paper itself, and before or after each one of them, you give the necessary descriptions. You may label them as Table I, Table II, Table III etc.
o Based on your research questions and the themes that you developed from your literature review, come up with subsections of the analyses and use the same strategy to provide titles for the tables. In other words, you are to use your variables to develop subsections and titles for the tables, charts, and graphs.
Content for the Discussion Section
Once you complete the Results section, you move on to the Discussion section. This section requires that you locate your findings in the literature and discuss your findings. By locating your findings in the literature, you will have to compare and contrast your findings with what you observed under the literature and evaluate your findings as to whether you sufficiently addressed your research questions.
Limitations and Future Research
Discuss the technical and scholarly difficulties encountered during this study
What recommendations do you have for future researchers including yourself
1.
Format for the submission of your survey for approval:
1: Research question A
Survey or interview question 1
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from (you dont need to provide responses if conducting interviews. Interview questions have to be open ended)
Survey or interview question 2
List all survey responses (response categories) (response categories) that participants will choose from
Survey or interview question 3
List all survey responses (response categories)that participants will choose from.
Survey or interview question 4
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from.
Repeat the above until you exhaust your questions
2: Research question B
Survey or interview question 1
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from.
Survey or interview question 2
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from
Survey or interview question 3
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from.
Survey or interview question 4
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from.
Repeat the above until you exhaust your questions
3: Research question C
Survey or interview question 1
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from.
Survey or interview question 2
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from
Survey or interview question 3
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from.
Survey or interview question 4
List all survey responses (response categories) that participants will choose from.
Repeat the above until you exhaust your questions
