Scholarly Writing: Article Analysis

2. Using your own words, describe the purpose of the study (hint: what was the author trying to prove? Why is he/she doing the study in the first place?)

3. What was the “gap” in the research that the authors were trying to fill by completing this study?

Part II: Major Findings

1. Make some notes about the authors’ major conclusions or findings as written in the article. Include quotation marks and appropriate citations whenever you use their exact wording, which includes page numbers).

2. Explain the conclusions in your own words.

Part III: Methodology

One of the characteristics of a qualitative or quantitative study is its ability to be duplicated with the same results. For example, if I find five kids, and I ask them, “Do you like chocolate ice cream?” and all of them said, “Yes”, could I generalize this to the entire population? In other words, is it accurate to say that 100% of all U.S. children like ice cream just because the five in my study did? You’ll likely tell me “no”, and I would agree.

However, if I were to conduct my study in a school where I chose students, at random, which represented all the demographics in a particular location, and my sample size was large enough (let’s say 500) and 375 tell me they like chocolate ice cream and 125 say they do not. Can I generalize this and say that 75% of all U.S. children like chocolate ice cream? If you’re following my line of logic, you would probably say “maybe”, but I think you would definitely say it would be a better sample than just the five children I surveyed earlier.

More importantly, if my result was 75%, how likely is it that someone else could contact the same study, with a similar sample, and reach the same conclusion (within a certain margin of error)? If the study is done correctly, the samples are representative of the population, and the sample size is large enough, we can generalize the results of a study to the population with surprising accuracy. This is what I mean by a study being replicable. After all, if a study is not able to be replicated, how do we know the information being provided is accurate? The answer is, simply, “we don’t”.

It’s important in your study that you describe the methodology you use to answer your research question. You have to carefully describe what you did, your sample size, the demographic, the location of the study, etc. so that if someone wanted to replicate your study, they would reach similar results.

Let’s use this to answer the questions in step 3:

1. Briefly summarize the main steps or measurements that the authors used in their methods. Try to explain in your own words as much as possible, and describe the methods in detail.

2. Do the authors suggest any problems or limitations with their methodology? (hint: Limitations is a section). Do you see any problems or limitations with their methodology?

3. How did the authors analyze their data? What test/s did they use?

Reliability

1. Do the authors suggest any problems with the study that could lead to unreliable results?

2. Do the conclusions made (about the results) by the author make sense to you? Are the conclusions too broad or too narrow based on what was actually done in the study?

3. Based on the methodology and reliability, do you think the conclusions can be believed?

4. Write, in your own words, the significant contributions of the experimental work in this journal article as reported by the authors.