ASSIGNMENT : REVIEWING RESEARCH AND MAKING CONNECTIONS
You've learned about the importance of research and the steps of the sociological research process.
For your first assignment, you will begin to work with this process by carefully reviewing an article about a research study.
The goal is to have you analyze the article to see how the steps of the research process informed the research presented in the piece.
This assignment will also encourage you to make connections between the research and your own life. To analyze your article, follow the Ask, Research, Learn, Do process that is outlined below.
This process was introduced in your web text as a simplified version of the sociological research process. It's a useful tool to help you think critically, answer questions, and solve problems.
Instructions: Complete both parts of the assignment by following the instructions below.
PART A: REVIEW THE RESEARCH 1) Review Articles a) Prepare to complete your assignment by reviewing the articles below. Select one for the focus of your first assignment.
• "What ‘Personal Space' Looks Like Around the World"
What ‘personal space' looks like around the world
If you've traveled even a little bit, you've surely had the experience of sharing a public space with someone (or many someones) who wants to stand closer to you than you'd allow your partner most of the time. (I often had this experience at the ATMs in Baku, Azerbaijan, where crowding has replaced queuing.)
It's because personal space - how close we stand to our colleagues, our friends, strangers - varies widely between countries. Sociologists have studied the whys and hows, and they've come up with some theories about why these social norms exist. Temperature tends to affect how people define personal space. So do gender and age.
But, they think, our personal boundaries have a lot to do with where we grow up. These researchers sort the world into "contact cultures" (South America, the Middle East, Southern Europe) and "non-contact cultures" (Northern Europe, North America, Asia). In non-contact cultures, people stand farther apart and touch less.
Now, a new study offers even more insight into what people from different countries expect from each other. In it, researchers looked at 9,000 people in 42 countries to understand exactly how personal space is defined in different countries. To do that, they handed each subject a graph showing two figures.
The image that researchers showed subjects. Courtesy of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
Then they told each subject: Imagine you're person A. How close should person B stand to you? Does that change if the person is a close friend? A colleague?
After they conducted the surveys, they averaged the results for each of the three categories.
Courtesy of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology
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They found that people in Argentina and other South American countries do, in general, require less personal space than people from Asia. In some places, strangers were encouraged to stay away, but friends could crowd in close. In Romania, for example, strangers are supposed to keep their distance. But friends can creep close.
In Saudi Arabia, people stand farther from their friends than Argentinians do with strangers. Hungarians want loved ones and strangers at arms length, or at least 75 centimeters.
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Cultures share some commonalities. Women preferred more personal space from strangers than men in almost all of the countries studied. People living in warmer places tended to keep less distance than those in colder climes. And the older you are, the farther away you stand.
These insights are interesting, experts say, because they help us understand social roles. "Cultural space tells us a lot," Kathryn Sorrells, a professor at California State University at Northridge, told NPR.
"It tells us a lot about the nature of a relationship. . . . So if someone comes more into your personal space than you are used to, you can often feel like, ‘What's happening here?' And it's easy to misread what someone is actually communicating if you only come from your cultural perspective."
2) Use the research information presented in the article to answer the questions below. You should write four paragraphs, one for each step listed in bold. Refer to Chapter 2 of the webtext as necessary.
a) Ask:
• What was the topic of the research?
• Who was studied in the research?
• What was the research question that was answered by the information in the article?
B, Research:
• What research methods were used?
• Summarize the process researchers used to collect data.
c) Learn:
• What were the key findings of the research?
• What conclusion was drawn from the research?
d) Do:
• What follow-up question would you now like to ask and research based on this articl
• Why did you choose this follow-up question?
PART B: MAKE CONNECTIONS
1) Use your article review to help answer the questions below. You should write two paragraphs, one for each question.
a) How can you apply the key research findings to your own life?
b) What are two additional questions that you have about society based on this research?
Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:
• Use Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
• Use section headers (Ask, Research, Learn, Do, and Make Connections) and write left indented paragraphs under each corresponding section.
• References are not required for this assignment as you will use one of the assigned articles and your webtext.
Attachment:- REVIEWING RESEARCH.rar