This week’s assignment has 3 different pieces, each designed to help you develop skill and confidence in dissecting and analyzing relevant scholarly research. You are to select an article that would contribute to an understanding of your particular topic of interest. This article must be current (i.e., within the past 5 years).
Topic: Interpersonal Communication
Part I: Global Article Analysis
1. What research gap is the article addressing?
2. How does the article intend to address this gap?
3. What are the specific research questions that this article will address?
4. What strands of previous and current research does this article use to create a rationale for its research questions?
5. What kind of data did the authors collect to answer their research questions and exactly how did they collect them?
6. How did the authors analyze their results?
7. How do the authors interpret their results? According to the authors, what do the results mean with regard to the research questions?
8. What do the authors see as limitations in their study?
9. What do the authors see as the implications of this research in terms of either application to real life or directions for future research?
10. What are the authors’ overall conclusions?
Part II. Style: Article Structure and “Hierarchy” Analysis
1. Analyze the macro-level structure (i.e., titles and organization of sections and subsections).
1. What evidence, if any, do you see of hierarchical, classification, or cause effect organization patterns?
2. What evidence, if any, do you see of parallelism?
2. Look at the literature review or a subsection of the literature review. If it is a subsection, you are looking for one with more than one paragraph.
1. Analyze the meso-level structure (i.e., order of the paragraphs).
2. .What evidence, if any, do you see of hierarchical, classification, or cause-effect organizational patterns in the order of the paragraphs?
3. Write a brief summary (e.g., 1-2 paragraph) of your analysis.
Part III: Summary
Write a summary of the article that includes a critique as well as your own suggestions for future research based on the gap you have identified. APA format (i.e., in-text citations and reference page) is required.
