You should have already completed research question, a purpose statement, and a bibliography in week two of this course. Next, you will complete the body of your final research paper. Your paper will need to consist of the following:
I. Review of the Literature (3-5 pages): All research projects include a literature review to set out for the reader what knowledge exists on the subject under study and helps the researcher develop the research strategy to use in the study. A good literature review is a thoughtful study of what is written, a summary of the arguments that exist (whether you agree with them or not), and are arranged thematically. The literature review is not an annotated bibliography and should be written in coherent narrative style. At the end of the summary, there should still be gaps in the literature that you intend to fill with your research. Yes, the sources you included in your Week 2 assignment should be included in the literature review for the final assignment. It is expected that you would have added a few more sources to those presented in Week 2. You should be thoroughly familiar with the sources you chose by this point.
II. Method and Research Strategy (1-2 pages): This section provides the reader with a description of your strategy to conduct research for this paper. It identifies your variables and how you operationalized your research approach. It describes the data you found and how you analyzed it for your Analysis and Findings. This section describes any limitations you discovered about your strategy and how you overcame them. Given the length of the class, this section usually describes how the researcher plans to analyze the data to arrive at reasonable findings.
III. Analysis and Findings (3-4 pages): This section provides the results of your research and the analytical arguments the paper makes as a result of an analysis of the variables, which in this study is the information and evaluation you found on both your extremist groups.This section should also provide the evidence that addresses your research study question(s) and fulfills the purpose of the research. As information is collected, researchers strive to make sense of their data. Generally, researchers interpret their data in one of two ways: holistically or through coding. Holistic analysis does not attempt to break the evidence into parts, but rather to draw conclusions based on the text as a whole. For example, researchers make inferences from entire sections of their study’s protocols, rather than searching through the transcripts to look for isolated characteristics.
There are two purposes of these frameworks: to look for patterns among the data and to look for patterns that give meaning to the case study. Given your use of ethnography, your work will lean more toward the use of holistic interpretation. Ask yourself, between these two groups: what are the similarities, what are the differences? Why? What makes them extreme? I think you get the idea.
IV. Conclusions (2 -3 pages): This section will contain the concluding analytical arguments based on what the research has revealed to answer the research study question(s). Like any conclusion, it should provide a synopsis of the project, the strategy, and the results and what they add to the body of knowledge. This section should also offer suggestions for avenues of future research for other scholars, as all knowledge is evolutionary.
V. References: This section will contain all references, cited in APA 6th edition format, properly indented, and alphabetically arranged. Your paper must contain a minimum of 6 reference sources with at least 2 of them being peer-reviewed journals. Entitle this section as “References” following the parenthetical and reference citation format style within APA 6th edition. Hint: the syllabus contains the bibliography for this course in APA format
