Assignment 4

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Assignment 4: Full-Sentence Outline

Due date: July 13, 1 p.m. Value: 150 points

• In this assignment you will submit an outline of the argument that you will be developing in your proposal.

• Read through the instructions below. See your syllabus for the due date.

• The Outline should be no more than 4 pages in length (double-spaced, references not included).

Write clearly, use simple sentence structures, and proofread your work.

• Since this is an outline, you can only write a couple of sentences to make your point. Important: If you write paragraphs of text (i.e., 3 sentences and more) instead, such outlines will be returned to you ungraded. See an example of a proper outline provided at the end of this assignment description.

• Note that there will not be pre-reads available for this assignment (this policy is nonnegotiable),

but I would be happy to answer any questions you have. Your outline should include the following (you can use these subheadings for this assignment, but for the final paper, use the subheadings as specified by the APA style):

1. Introduction:

a. What are the purpose/goals of your study? b. Why does the proposed study matter? (i.e., what are the theoretical and/or practical

implications?) c. How are you going to study your idea? Is it an experiment/a survey/participant

observation?

2. Literature review:

a. Outline the argument that explains the relationships between the variables that you are studying. Your argument has to be grounded in existing theories and empirical work on your topic.

b. Cite relevant literature: From your outline, it should be clear that you’ve done a thorough literature search, backing up the argument that you are developing.

c. If a variable is NOT part of your RQs or Hs, it should not be discussed in your paper. d. Note that there are two different types of literature reviews. First, a review of literature

can be done to synthesize research in a particular area of studies. In this case, you summarize articles and draw conclusions based on them. Usually, book-chapters are a good example of this kind of literature review. Second, a review of literature can also be done as a part of an empirical study (which is what you are proposing). In this case, you are building a rationale for your study predictions. In this type of literature review, you are only discussing articles that are directly relevant to your predictions. For example, if

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your proposal is about the effects of socio-economic status (SES) on communication competency, and you found an article on SES and child mortality rates, this article will not be central to your study. You can briefly mention this article to demonstrate that SES affects many facets of people’s lives, but discussing it at length will detract from the goals of your study. Essentially, what you should be trying to do in your literature review is to build the best case for why your predictions are warranted, and your literature review should only review research that is relevant to your study.

3. Hypotheses and Research Questions: List your Hs and RQs.

4. Because you have already submitted a draft of your method section, I am not asking you to provide an outline for it.

5. Discussion:

a. Summary of your RQs and Hs. b. What is the significance of the proposed study? (i.e., theoretical

importance/implications/practical applications). c. Limitations: What factors may potentially undermine your results? For example, if you

selected college students as your study participants, and your results are expected to generalize to the U.S. population at large, using college students is a limitation.

d. Future research directions: What is the next step? What research questions should be addressed next?

e. Conclusions

6. References: Include a reference list for all sources cited in your outline. Use the APA guideline (For a generic description see the description for the Method Section Assignment).

EXAMPLE: Below is an example of an outline of an argument for a study examining the effects of psychological reactance over time.

1. There has been a resurgence of research on psychological reactance (cite as many sources

as you found here).

a. Reactance is defined as … (cite)

b. The causes of reactance are … (cite)

c. It is important to study the effects of reactance because many persuasive

campaigns fail as a result of psychological reactance (cite).

2. Within this realm of research, the effects of reactance over time are particularly

interesting:

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a. Studying the effects of reactance over time is important because:

i. Reason 1: Although a substantial amount of research examining reactance

at the immediate time measurement indicates that reactance has negative

effects on persuasion (cite accordingly), whether these negative effects

persist overtime remains unknown.

ii. Reason 2: The research attempting to examine the effects of reactance

over time has yielded contradictory results (cite accordingly). Note: If you

only have one reason for studying something, that is fine.

3. The contradictory findings regarding the effects of reactance over time are found in the

following research:

a. Miller (1976) in his experiment found that negative reactance effects persist over

time.

b. Conversely, Bessarabova et al. (2010) in their experiment reported that negative

reactance effects dissipate over time.

4. There are several potential explanations for these conflicting results:

a. Miller’s (1976) study had several methodological issues:

i. Problems with reactance manipulation: Lack of manipulation checks for

indicating that reactance manipulation was successful.

ii. Lack of control over time measurement: Imprecise time measurement was

used.

5. The study proposed here is going to address the discrepancy in this research by:

a. Replicating the experiment conducted by Miller et al. (2010) addressing the

problems with manipulations and measurement.