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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 k 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 k 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 k (American Psychological Association, k 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 k 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 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
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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.
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
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REFERENCES
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
k k k k Statistics in Psychology II. Retrieved April 24, 2022, from
k k k https://canvas.liberty.edu/courses/336469/modules
St. Peters, M. (2022). Scientific Writing: Results and Discussion. Research Methods
and
k k k k Statistics in Psychology II. Retrieved April 24, 2022, from
k k k https://canvas.liberty.edu/courses/336469/modules
