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As your peer, I appreciate the opportunity to review your article before its publication. In
reviewing your writing, you have a couple of strengths and weaknesses that I have identified and
would like to bring to your attention. In discussing your strengths, first, you provided adequate
data on how i your research was conducted, you made it very easy to follow and understand.
Your second strength is you also provided adequate data showing the inconsistencies in the
previous study and how it supported your nonsignificant results. However, I did notice a couple
of weaknesses in your article. First you failed to use scientific language when presenting your
hypothesis. You stated “the null hypothesis is correct”, when the verbiage taht is most
commonly stated i is “we failed to reject the null hypothesis”. Also in your discussion you stated
that there was “no proof” which in the social sciences we do not aim to show cause and effect or
prove a theory. Instead of saying “no proof” you could have said “ no correlation”. Second, your
Table is not APA formatted. The title should be under the table number and the table should be
in black and white or gray scale, no grid lines and no color; see Section 7.9 i (American
Psychological Association, i 2020, p. 199, 215-216). Third, Figure 1 is not APA formatted. The
graph should also be in black and white, or gray scale which includes the dots. The title should
also be under neath the i words Figure 1; ; see section 7.23 (American Psychological Association,
2020, p. 225). Lastly, your discussion section heading should be Level 1 which is center as well
as being bold; see Section 2.27 (American Psychological Association, 2020, p. 47). i I hope these
minor corrections were helpful. You explained your demographic question well, and you
also explained what demographics specifically were not included in the analysis, so the
reader better understands your study. The second strength that I would love to point out
is your use of SPSS. I enjoyed your scatterplot figure, as those can be hard to get correct,
since you have to remember to name the axis and continue a few extra steps in SPSS to
retain an accurate scatterplot such as yours.
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I believe the relevance or your articles in your discussion was clear, as your related them
well with your current study and how past research could be used to further research on
the discussion at hand.
You did use appropriate terms throughout the paper, such as how you said you used
Pearson's correlation to test your hypothesis.
The first weakness that I see in your paper is the formatting of your table. The title of the
table should be below the table number, and it should be in italic title case with a double
space between the table number and title, as per typical APA format (American
Psychological Association, 2020). The table itself appears to be copy and pasted from
your SPSS output, but it is not put into APA format as presented by Dr. Megan St. Peters
(2022) in this past week's video. The second weakness that I see is your APA write up as
shown correctly in week one's video on Correlation and Regression in SPSS (St. Peters,
2022). I see you included the degrees of freedom, the r value, and the p value, but they are
not written in the correct fashion, such as r (n) = r value, p = p value (one/two-tailed). You
also did not indicate whether the test was one or two tailed in your APA write up of the
results, nor did I see a coefficient of determination written there. The third weakness I
observed was the lack of in test citations. Even if you think you are sounding redundant
by repeating a citation, it is required every single time you mention anything from an
outside source, or article. For example, the paragraph where you mention the article from
"King et al (2022)", you start out with a great in text citation, but the rest of the paragraph
does not show any more. After, or within, each sentence that is summarizing the article
should have a citation somewhere within it.
One strength of your paper is that you incorporated substantial research to point out the
varied inconsistencies in research so far. Another strength is that you provided your results and
interpreted them well, as well as your limitations. One thing to improve would to be careful of
run-on sentences in your Discussion section. Next, in your Results section, you state that there is
a negative correlation between the variables but then state the null hypothesis is correct. An
inverse correlation is still a correlation. If there is no correlation, make sure to state that. Also,
you would fail to reject the null hypothesis instead of saying it is right. It is very interesting that
your sample was all active-duty sailors
REFERENCES
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American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication Manual of the American
Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000
St. Peters, M. (2022). Correlation and Regression in SPSS. Research Methods and
i i i i Statistics in Psychology II. Retrieved April 24, 2022, from
i i i i https://canvas.liberty.edu/courses/336469/modules
St. Peters, M. (2022). Scientific Writing: Results and Discussion. Research Methods and
i i i i Statistics in Psychology II. Retrieved April 24, 2022, from
i i i i https://canvas.liberty.edu/courses/336469/modules
