Assignment: Journal Article Critique:
To promote the development of critical thinking skills, students will select an empirical research article of their choosing from the scholarly literature, students will provide a brief description of the article's findings, identify the key research questions that were addressed, summarize the type of research design and data collection methods that were utilized, and note any potential validity and reliability issues (in addition to other weaknesses) that are manifest. Need Assignment Help?
The main goal is to critique the author(s)' methodology utilized in a single journal article. This includes two parts. In the first part, you will: (1) briefly summarize the topic, variables, and research questions/hypotheses; (2) delineate the specific type of research design that was employed (e.g., denote the author(s)' data collection strategy and other important elements); and (3) describe the author(s)' specific analytic techniques that were performed (e.g., regression analysis, bivariate analysis, content analysis, etc.). Then, after doing this, you will take what you have learned in this course and apply it. For example, you should discuss the various strengths and weaknesses associated with the author(s)' application of their research design/methods. Are there issues with validity? What about reliability? Are there ways that you would improve upon the author(s)' design? Are there issues with the author(s)' sample, data collection techniques, conceptualization of variables, operationalization of variables, data analysis, etc.? I don't want you to simply summarize what the authors believe are the various strengths/weaknesses of their own study (e.g., "Jones (2000) believes that some of the potential strengths/weaknesses of his study are..." Or, "Jones (2000) recommends that this study could be improved by..."). As budding researchers, I want to see you perform your own original analysis of the author(s)' research methodology in this assignment.
In addition to these formal guidelines, the journal article critiques will also be graded stylistically. This means that the analysis must be readable and devoid of egregious typos, grammatical errors, misspellings, etc. For an abbreviated list of general writing guidelines, please see the General Writing Guidelines section below. The journal article critiques shall be submitted in either a "rich text" or Microsoft Word format via the "Journal Article Critique" link in the "Assignments" section of Canvas. The journal article that you choose to critique does not necessarily have to be of the same topic as your research proposal (also see the Journal Article Critique Rubric in the "Files" section of Canvas).