In order to allow all students the opportunity to complete their Writing in the Discipline (WID) requirement, this course has several major paper requirements. In addition to receiving a grade for mastery of course content, students will also be required to submit paper proposal, a rough (first) draft for proofing and revision, and a final paper. Each of these requirements will contribute to your final grade on the assignment.
Sociological Objectives:
1. Introduce students to the existing areas of sociological research on racial and ethnic relations.
2. Develop familiarity with several sociological journals.
3. Develop an appreciation of how sociologists conduct empirical research.
4. Conduct a high-quality literature review on an issue of your choice.
5. Develop a researchable hypothesis.
The library research paper requires you to define a social issue associated with minority group statuses, to read sociological research regarding that issue, and write a descriptive/critical review of that research literature. Your grade on the assignment will be determined by your ability to follow the instructions for constructing that paper, and the sophistication of your presentation.
Requirements
A. ACCEPTABLE TOPICS
Your paper must address a bona fide, sociologically relevant social issue. By bona fide, I mean an area of research common to the discipline of sociology, and more important, found in the existing sociological literature. This topic must be germane to minority group relations in our contemporary U.S. society.
As you learned in your introductory course, sociologists study a wide spectrum of social issues. You might begin by recalling that sociology involves the scientific study of social patterns and social arrangements. In addition, sociologists recognize the essential roles of (a) history and of (b) social environments in determining people’s lives.
Most research tends to center around issues of inequality across groups. In this context, our research might compare economic, educational, or political differences between different minorities groups and the dominant group. As a concrete example, your term paper might analyze studies of wage inequality or occupational segregation, or patterns associated with poverty or crime. You might focus on access to education or health care, as determined by race or ethnicity. Alternatively, you might explore these same relationships in the context of gender, or sexual orientation. However, this is only one possibility. You may instead choose to study issues that seem to divide members within the same group (e.g., affluent v. poor African Americans, native v. immigrant Asian communities, Caribbean v. Southwestern Latinos, etc.). In any case, much of the research in sociology is comparative, and tends to study differences.
In order to assure that you start off in the right direction, I must approve a topic before you begin the paper. You and I will need to talk very early in the semester once you have decided on a topic or two that you would like to read. We can certainly do this by email, but we will need to do it early. Professional research monographs require a lot of reading time so do not put this off until later. There is no information you need to know in order to get started.
B. ACCEPTABLE SOURCES
You must explicitly use the existing sociological research literature. Since this is a library research paper, you might simply go to a university library in your home community if one is available, and simply skim through a few sociology journals to see what sort of research we typically conduct. This is one way to get an idea of what you might wish to read. Once you have a general idea of the topic you wish to explore, you will need to use JSTOR on the Western Illinois University Library webpage to find three articles on your topic.
Because you are enrolled at WIU, you simply need to access our university library’s webpage, and attempt to use a search engine to find articles on your topic. When you do so, the website will ask you to provide your ECOM ID and PASSWORD before allowing you to search for articles. However, you must enter the search engines through the WIU site. If you try to access the search engine websites directly, you will get an error message. The university library’s website is: https://www.wiu.edu/EZproxy/auth/ezwiu.scgi?url=http://www.jstor.org/
As soon as you log onto JSTOR, immediately find the ADVANCED SEARCH function before you enter your key words (it is typically right below the box where you would enter search terms). After you click on the advanced search option, you will be taken to a new webpage that includes a couple nice features. First, if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, you will see that you can limit your search to relevant sociology journals by clicking on a button (pretty neat, eh?).
After that, scroll back to the top. At the top of the page, below where you can enter your keywords, you will also see an option to limit your search to only ARTICLE items. In the same area, you should also enter the years 2000 and 2008 in the DATE RANGE boxes.
Once you have done these things, you are ready to enter your key words, and see what empirical research you can find on your topic. It may take you several attempts to locate three articles that sound interesting, but in short order, you should be able to find three relatively research sociology articles that study some aspect of minority group relations.
I will expect you to use five to ten research based journal articles. As you look through the list of journal articles that appear, you will need to limit your choices to only articles that appear in the following professional sociological journals:
• American Journal of Sociology
•Sociology of Education
•Social Science Quarterly
•American Sociological Review
•Social Forces
•Sociological Quarterly
•Social Problems
•Criminology
•Work and Occupations
•Journal of Marriage and Family
•Social Psychology Quarterly
•Gender and Society
While I am sure you will see many other interesting titles, you are only allowed to use research articles from the above journals. Thus, you must be careful in selecting the three articles you will read. Unless your paper relies upon the above sociological research journals, your paper will not receive a passing grade.
I am limiting the papers to those that explore the empirical, sociological research. I will not accept theoretical, philosophical or argumentative papers. Sociologists are social scientists, and we practice science, not rhetoric. By immersing yourself in the research literature of sociologists, you will better understand this discipline. Hence the requirement of a library research paper.
C. ACCEPTABLE FORMATTING
Proper referencing skills are essential, and expected at the college level. In addition, you college-level papers must be written in a professional voice, and be professionally formatted. Any omissions in this regard will count against your grade on the assignment.
Specifically, your paper should meet the following guidelines:
1. All reference materials must be cited throughout the text of the paper. Specifically, when you are referring to ideas found in an article, you should clearly indicate (a) the author and (b) the year in which the article was published.
2. Avoid using quotations whenever possible. You should paraphrase ideas, rather than quoting people. Paraphrasing does not make the idea yours, however, and you should give a citation reference when doing so. This assignment is assessing how well you understand the materials you read. If you simply quote lines from the readings, I cannot tell if you really understand the materials. Instead, paraphrase the articles when necessary, and give a cite reference to the idea you are interpreting. If you must quote an article, you must use quotation marks to indicate the quote, and then include the page number(s) in addition to the author and year.
3. You must properly document the specific articles used in a table of references at the end of the paper. A proper reference lists the author, year, name of the article (in quotes), name of the journal (in italics), journal issue number and pages. As examples, sociologists use the following format:
Hironimus-Wendt, Robert J., and Lora Ebert Wallace. 2009. “The Sociological Imagination and Social Responsibility.” Teaching Sociology 37(1): 76-88.
Hironimus-Wendt, Robert J. 2009. “Group Activities and Experiential-learning Exercises.” Pp. A-1 – A-47 in Judy G. Kairath, Instructor’s Resource Manual: Sociology the Essentials (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Cengage Learning.
Hironimus-Wendt, Robert J. 2008. “The Human Costs of Worker Displacement.” Humanity and Society 32(1):71-93.
4. Your term paper must be double-spaced, typed, with one-inch margins, and use normal fonts and pitches. Times New Roman (12 font) is generally used in professional papers, although Arial (12 font) is also acceptable.
5. The paper must include at least 10 (or more) full pages of written text. Less than ten full pages of actual text will not pass. Your line-count will begin with the first line of actual text. I will not count Headers (e.g., titles) toward your ten full pages of written text minimum. Your best rule of thumb will be to write onto an eleventh page. You must also include a separate title page, and a separate reference page. These however do not count toward the ten pages of text.
6. Grammar and syntax matter, period. Your paper will be written with a professional voice. As such, you should ask a colleague or the staff of the writing center to proof your paper before submitting it for the final grade. Grammar, organization, clarity of thought, etc. will substantially contribute to your grade.
For more information regarding the sociological model for formatting, see: American Sociological Association Style Guide
D. ACCEPTABLE STRUCTURE
1. Introduction (at least 2 pages)
Statement of the Problem What specific issue are you researching? Why did you choose this topic? What general arguments exist related to the topic? Give at least two competing perspectives/arguments regarding this issue. What does common sense tell you? What do you anticipate will be found in the scientific research literature?
Theoretical Development At which level of analysis do you think this problem should be studied? Which sociological perspectives (for example, conflict theory, functionalism, symbolic interaction, feminism) do you find most useful for studying this issue? Why? How do you think the other sociological perspectives would approach the study of this problem?
2. Presentation of Articles (at least 5 pages)
Summary of the first article
•What was this study about? What were the authors trying to discover? What were their specific hypotheses?
•Where did the data they used come from? What sort of sample was used to create the data set?
•How was the study actually done? How did they analyze the data? What statistical techniques were used to analyze these data? These are often listed in the headings to the tables that present the results as well as in the discussion that precedes the presentation of findings.
•
•What were the basic findings of this study?
Summary of the second article
•What was this study about? What were the authors trying to discover? What were their specific hypotheses?
•Where did the data they used come from? What sort of sample was used to create the data set?
•How was the study actually done? How did they analyze the data? What statistical techniques were used to analyze these data? These are often listed in the headings to the tables that present the results as well as in the discussion that precedes the presentation of findings.
•What were the basic findings of this study?
Etc…
•What was this study about? What were the authors trying to discover? What were their specific hypotheses?
•Where did the data they used come from? What sort of sample was used to create the data set?
•How was the study actually done? How did they analyze the data? What statistical techniques were used to analyze these data? These are often listed in the headings to the tables that present the results as well as in the discussion that precedes the presentation of findings.
•What were the basic findings of this study?
3. Summary/Conclusion (at least 3 pages)
Based on your readings, develop a summary statement that compares and contrasts the articles you read. How are they similar? What do they have in common? How do they differ? What do they suggest collectively about the issue you choose?
What does this review suggest regarding the nature of the problem, its potential causes, potential solutions, etc.? What questions are left unanswered? How might you propose we go about resolving those unanswered questions? What sort of sociological research might be necessary in order to answer those questions?
What did you personally learn about the topic? What did you learn about the ways sociologists conduct research? What do you think would be a good area for future research? How might additional research help us better understand the issue you chose to study?
4. References
List of the articles you used on a separate page.
Because this is to be professional paper, each section of your paper must have a subheading (e.g., Introduction, Presentation of Empirical Research, etc.). If you choose to use the titles of the articles to create sub-headings, you need to simplify the subheadings. DO NOT USE A BIBLIOGRAPHIC CITING AS A SUBHEADING.
Do not use the names of the articles and the journals when referring to each study in the body of your paper. Instead, simply refer to the authors and the year of publication.
INCORRECT: In Testing for Discrimination in Hiring Practices: The Case of Sexism in Fast Food Chainsby Andrew Jackson and James Beard (American Journal of Sociology 1997, pp. 201-243), the authors attempted to determine whether or not employers discriminate on the basis of sex when interviewing applicants.
CORRECT: Jackson and Beard (1997) attempted to determine whether or not employers discriminate on the basis of sex when interviewing applicants.
NOTE: It is improper to use the name of the article and/or to use the name of the journal in your written text. Just cite the author(s) and year in your text, and reference the titles and journals in your reference section.
