Research Project Instructions
This assignment requires students to design a study of a media-related phenomenon. Students should design a survey, a content analysis, or an experiment. Studies should be designed to test specific Hypotheses and/or answer specific Research Questions. The required sections that must be included in the graded document are described below.
Introduction (2 pages)
This section should introduce the reader to your topic. You should first define the area you are studying, give a reason for why it deserves or needs to be studied, and tell what you intend to find out and.
Review of Existing Literature (3 pages)
In this section you should review the existing scholarship on the topic you are studying. What have people found before? You should find academic journals and popular press sources that talk about your topic and suggest which questions need to be asked or what hypotheses need to be posed.
Statement of Research Questions and/or Hypotheses (1 page)
In this section you state the specific questions you are going to try and answer and/or the actual hypotheses you are going to test. It is OK to provide a few sentences to introduce your RQs and Hs.
Methods (3 pages)
Here you should describe the design of your study. This includes telling whether you are doing a survey, an experiment, or a content analysis and providing the details of the specific structure of the design. You should tell who or what you will sample and how you will sample or assign to conditions. How did you operationalize your concepts? What are your measures? Provide the specific procedures you went through to get your data.
Results (1 page)
In this section you simply report the analyses you undertook and your findings. Don’t get editorial. Just provide the numbers, how you got them, and tell whether they supported your hypotheses/answered your questions or not. You are encouraged to provide figures and tables that might aid in relaying your findings.
Discussion (2 pages)
In this section you write about what you think the results mean. This is where you interpret the findings from the previous section. You should mention the weaknesses of your results and suggest how what you found might help future researchers in this area. What related questions might future researchers focus on?
References
List all of the external references using APA style,essays must be double spaced with one-inch margins on all four sides of 8½ by 11 inch paper. Correct spelling, punctuation, grammar, and diction are expected. Standard footnote or endnote and notation of references must be used. Students should use the format of the American Psychological Association for all in-text citations and for their reference lists.
