Research Methods Annotated Bibliography.
Your task is to carefully select 4 peer-reviewed scholarly research articles that relate to your research topic. The purpose of this task is to continue familiarizing yourself with searching for and summarizing academic literature related to a topic you are interested in. This process will also help prepare you to craft your specific research question. You should be highly selective about the articles you choose for this assignment. You will thoroughly describe and evaluate each article, and thus, do not want to waste your time. For the article you choose you will need to identify the: 1) Motivation – The authors’ motivation for the research. Why is this an important or worthy topic of inquiry? What is the context? You can typically find this in the Introduction section of an article. 2) Research question – The authors’ specific research question(s). Social science research questions are used to predict, explain, and describe social phenomena. Questions are often about the relationship between independent and dependent variables, a cause and an effect. You can typically find this in the Abstract/Introduction sections of an article. 3) Approach – Their approach to answering the research question(s). Did they use a case study, conduct a survey, or collect data in some other way? What evidence do they use to address their research question? You can typically find this information in the Methods section of a research article. Sometimes, it is briefly described in the Abstract. 4) Findings and conclusion – What are their findings? How do they answer their research questions? What are the implications of their findings? Research articles typically summarize this information in a Discussion/Conclusion section, at the end of the paper. Once you have summarized the four articles you will briefly discuss (in 1-2 paragraphs) how these research articles will inform your research topic. For example, you can comment on the effectiveness and usefulness of these articles for your own research topic. This is your chance to reflect on the summaries you’ve written. Each article summary should be at least 1 page (12 inch font, double-spaced). The annotated bibliography should be at least 5 pages (4 summaries + reflection).