When first reading the article by Jordan and Zanna (1999), I was relieved
that this article would further help me understand the complex journal
and scholarly articles. I have done a lot of research in my education thus
far, and I have found some really hard articles to understand. Sometimes,
I won’t even use the source for this reason as, if I don’t understand how
am I going to use it in my paper.
When Jordan and Zanna (1999) stated “For beginning readers, journal
articles may seem anything but interesting and exciting. They may, on the
contrary, appear daunting and esoteric, laden with jargon and obscured
by menacing statistics” (p. 461) I completely agree with this. In the
beginning of my higher education career, I was having a really hard time
trying to find articles I could actually understand. Therefore, the advice
that I really liked from Jordan and Zanna (1999) was to make sure to read
the abstract. The abstract contains a lot of useful information about the
article such as the study and the direction that the article is going to go in.
Jordan and Zanna (1999) compare the title and the abstract of the article
to be like a movie premier before the actual movie. This advice will
hopefully help me in the future when researching articles.
The article that I am currently researching is-Practitioner Review: Maternal
Mood in Pregnancy and Child Development--Implications for Child
Psychology and Psychiatry-by Thomas G. O’Connor, Catherine Monk, and
Elizabeth M. Fitelson. This article connects prenatal mental illnesses such
as anxiety, depression and stress to overall child development. This article
developed a study on this topic and how the mother’s mental illness can
affect or even hinder the development of the child. While researching and
reviewing this article, I took the time to read the abstract, as suggested by
Jordan and Zanna (1999) and I actually found it really helpful in learning
more about the article. Overall, I found the advice and concepts in Jordan
and Zanna’s (1999) article to be extremely helpful when researching
articles.
References
Jordan, C. H., & Zanna, M. P. (1999). How to read a journal article in social
psychology.-The Self in Social Psychology, 461–470.-
O'Connor, T. G., Monk, C., & Fitelson, E. M. (2014). Practitioner review:
Maternal mood in pregnancy and child development – Implications for
child psychology and psychiatry.-Journal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatry,-55(2), 99–111.-
