Term Paper

Guidelines for the Term paper:

I am scaling back your term paper assignment this semester. Instead of 8 to 10 pages total, I would like the body of your literature review (not counting title page and reference list) to be 4 to 5 pages. You’ve written a proposal and received my feedback on it, but here is some more detail about my expectations for the finished product. 

 

Overall expectations

· All writing should be your own. Any word-for-word phrases that come from other sources will be inside quotation marks and properly cited.  Any ideas that come from other sources should be cited, too. All papers will be checked with TurnItIn plagiarism detection.

· Sources should generally be academic research – long, with a big list of sources at the end. (A few exceptions can be made for news sources that report up-to-date information, such as the percentage of Americans online.)

· Every paper should have a page that lists its references in APA style (if you need help, a quick online guide is available at  https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ (Links to an external site.) ).

· You must submit an electronic copy through Canvas.

· It is worth 400 points, or 20% of your grade.

 

The literature review

· A well-researched general literature review integrates and presents what is known about a topic. You report on the research and writings of others, and you cite them appropriately. (A different kind of literature review makes an argument or offers a rationale for a set of hypotheses or research questions that your study goes on to examine with empirical data. You may well write that kind for your capstone project.)

· You will want to demonstrate an understanding of your topic and round up the best research on it.

· Usually it’s best to organize the paper around areas within the topic. A history of how African-Americans have been represented could follow a historical organization, from earliest representations to modern ones.  A discussion of the effects of media violence might be organized around the different effects (fright, mean world perceptions, aggressive behavior, etc.).

· Integration of your sources is important. Use the sources together to make points (or counterpoints); show how they comment on each other. I don’t want a paper that reads like a bunch of unconnected abstracts.

· I will expect a minimum of 8 sources. These should be high-quality academic sources. And you should cite all of them in a way that shows how they contribute to our understanding of your topic.

Response for the proposal：

Intro 70/80

Good topic idea. You also seem focused not just on media but on news media specifically, and your focus includes effects on public opinion. This is a good scope for work. Topics might include immigration in the U.S. as well as the refugee crisis in Europe mainly from Syria.

You make some assumptions about how media broadly speaking report on immigration. You will find there are many different frames that media (in following their sources) may use. This is not so much a question of accuracy but rather of focus. That said, frames that focus on specific crimes that immigrants have committed suggest an inaccurate association between immigrants and crime; most research finds crime rates for immigrants (including undocumented ones) are lower than for native citizens.

(The term “undocumented” is not generally considered an anti-immigrant term such as “illegals” or worse, “wetbacks.” In some ways, it is a technical term; some might even consider it a euphemism.)

Source quality 25/30

You have three high quality sources (two articles in reputable journals and a book from an academic publisher). One of your sources was published in the “INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC & TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH,” which is known as a predatory journal. That means the journal accepts every submission, no matter how poor, and authors pay to have their work published. In looking at it myself, the article is very brief, not well written, and reports no original research.

Source relevance 28/30

All sources seem very much linked to the question of how media represent immigrants and what effects that has on public opinion about immigrants.

Summaries 45/60

The summaries sometimes don’t sound much like their sources. For instance, Chattopadhyay (2019) does not find the media (in this case just 35 stories from the New York Times) “misrepresent reality.” (This article seems to assume the NYT’s reporting accurately reflects, for instance, changes in the types of migrants and changes in U.S. policy).

It is important to focus on research findings. For instance, Figueroa-Caballero and Mastro (2018) find that reports of crime done by illegal immigrants leads to greater in-group identification and more negative attitudes toward immigration and, in turn, support for harsher crime sentencing. You describe Haynes et al (2016) as an article. It is a book.