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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 b 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 b 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 b (American Psychological Association, b 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 b 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
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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.
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
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instead of saying it is right. It is very interesting that your sample was all active-duty
sailors
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
b b b Statistics in Psychology II. Retrieved April 24, 2022, from
b b b b https://canvas.liberty.edu/courses/336469/modules
St. Peters, M. (2022). Scientific Writing: Results and Discussion. Research Methods
and
b b b Statistics in Psychology II. Retrieved April 24, 2022, from
b b b b https://canvas.liberty.edu/courses/336469/modules
