1.7 Reading, understanding and writing up empirical research articles

SOWK 621: DeCarlo

Reading and Outlining an Empirical Journal Article

Explanation

For this course you will have to read a lot of academic journal articles.  The goal of this assignment is to build skills on how to extract the information you need from each article you come across as efficiently as possible.  This class is designed for you to explore in greater detail aspects of Human Service Profession that are interesting to you.  After conducting a literature search using an academic database (Google Scholar, Academic Search Complete, PubMed, PSYCinfo), choose one article that you find interesting that you want to read. 

Empirical articles provide information based on data analysis conducted by the author(s) writing the paper.

Empirical articles are broken down into the following sections (though names sometimes vary):

• Introduction: provides background information on the social problem and the specific variables in the article
  • Will usually end with the research question.
• Methods: provides an overview of measures and operational definitions, sampling, design, and data analysis
• Results: provides the results of each statistical test
  • This will usually start with descriptive statistics and demographic information on the study’s participants
  • And move onto the research questions in the paper.
• Discussion: provides context for the study’s results within the overall literature on the topic
• Conclusions/limitations: provides the key takeaways of the paper

Please create a Word document and submit the following to D2L.

1. Choose an article that will likely be a part of your research proposal.
   1. Write out the citation to the article in APA format.  (Google Scholar will give you a citation that is correct about 80% of the time, you should double-check it.)
2. Fill in the following sections by typing or copy/pasting.  (Copying directly tends to save a lot of time, in my experience.)
   1. General Idea:
      1. 1-2 sentence summary of the article.  Write this yourself or copy from the Abstract.
   2. Facts from the Literature:
      1. In the Introduction and Discussion sections, authors will provide an interpretation of the existing literature on a topic.
      2. Copy any facts, theories, or other bits of information you think might be useful in your research paper
         1. Copy the sentence or phrase that the author writes with the internal citation at the end.
         2. Example: 73 people per year are killed by wombats (Ambrose, 1992).
      3. You may want to begin sorting these by topic, though you don’t have to do so.
   3. Measures: (optional)
      1. The Methods section of a research article will include how the authors measured their variables.  Make note of any variables you plan to include in your study and how the authors measured them.
         1. This will save you time when you write Part 2 of your proposal and need to describe how you will measure your variables.
   4. Results:
      1. What are the main results from the article that are relevant to your research proposal?
      2. (Again, copying and pasting is okay here.  These are just notes.)
   5. Sources of Interest:
      1. From the references, copy all of the citations for any articles you included in the Facts from the Literature section or that you might find useful in your paper.
3. Answer the following questions:
   1. Why would someone seek out this source?  What questions would they try to answer?
   2. How does this resource build upon, challenge, or relate to other literature on the topic?
   3. Why do you think this is a reputable source from a competent and trustworthy author?

NOTE: In the future, I will refer to these notes as a “Raw Outline.”

Assignment

Please read the following journal article, The Effects of Adverse Childhood Experience on internalizing and externalizing behaviors among black children and youth