For the term paper, you will need to write a brief literature review on a topic of your interest.

You’ve already started the introduction (feedback incoming soon). This will build off of your introduction (introductions give a general state of the issue and identify the problem statement/question; literature reviews go into further detail and specifically detail what we mean when we say a term or identify a relationship). For this one, try to give it the following flow:

1. Topic of interest (often this will be the Dependent Variable in Research/Methods)

2. Explanatory variables (these will tie into concepts from your chosen theory and/or relelvant theories identified as you delve into extant research)

3. Control variables (these will be the concepts that have an effect on your topic of interest, but are less relevant to the theory)

A literature review is a synthesis of extant research on your topic (read the attached article, by Denney and Tewksbury). In short,there is likely a large body of research on your topic that addresses aspects of the topic which are extremely specific. You’ll have to go through that body of research to get an understanding of how that topic actually functions in relations to all other relevant factors (all of the things that fould have a major effect on it), and you need to understand it at multiple levels. The role of theory is to provide a framework for doing so (further, between this framework and a firm understanding of methodology, you’ll have the tools to understand anything!). A good idea would be to think about the topic and see what theories pop up.

In the term paper, you will provide an in-depth discussion of research that has been conducted on your chosen topic. Some topics will have more available research. If your topic doesn’t have a great deal of published research, set up a meeting with me to develop your ideas (or start emailing me – I’m a little hard to reach).

The literature review should be approximately 7-10 pages (not including cover page or reference pages), should utilize at least 25 academic sources (i.e., peer-reviewed research), and follow APA formatting. Make sure to cite anything that would not be considered “common knowledge” (there has been a lot of time and people before us, so the likelihood someone else already had the idea is extremely high – make sure to look and be able to cite).

The rough draft of the literature review is due Monday, April 1 at 11:59 pm.

Requirements: 7-10 pages