Presentation Instructions for Final Paper

The purpose of the Virtual Presentation Assignment is to encourage students to develop:

• Online presentational skills
• Research skills--qualitative and quantitative
• Individual and team research skills in how to write concisely and interestingly for the online community
• A permanent online library of published research presentations that will be available to the political science community.

The following might be of help.

PBS 2004 Media Analysis and Ad Watch

Also check out C-span's Campaign 2004 Video Search for relevant video material.

The requirements for the final paper include:

1. work individually or in teams of 2 or more to develop a 15-page paper on an instructor-approved topic which includes:

• Mar. 15, Topic and Research Questions
• Mar. 29, "fast facts" section
• Apr. 12, analysis section 1
• May 6, revised analytic section
• May 18, introduction section
• May 18, relevant audio and video clips embedded in the paper
• May 18 , 250 word abstract
• May 18 Final paper in hardcopy and html version
  

1. Each assignment is due in a html version to me,  via an attachment, dtabb@sfsu.edu on the due date and a hardcopy to Tabb's office.

Guidelines for Research Design

Your final research paper should be in the range of 15 double-spaced typed pages not counting tables, graphs, and appendices. Unless you have what you think is a better way of organizing your report, use the following subheadings.

1. TOPIC AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS (Due Mar. 15): Briefly explain and justify your choice of topic. What specifically are your research questions? Why do you think they are important? What sorts of data will you use to explore answers to these questions? What do you expect to learn from your study? Provide any necessary background information your reader might need to make sense of your research goals. A formal literature review is not necessary, but if you do refer to the published work of others, be sure to cite such work fully and properly in footnotes or endnotes.

2. KEY CONCEPTS AND VARIABLES: Introduce and define your key concepts (e.g., "political ideology," "political participation," "social class," "trust in government"). Show how the variables selected from the data set correspond to these key concepts. Discuss measurement validity and reliability, identifying any limitations of the selected variables as measures of your key concepts. In general, show how this selection of variables is consistent with your research questions.

3. HYPOTHESES AND THEORETICAL RATIONALE: State your hypotheses, each specifying a predicted relationship between the dependent variable and one independent variable. For each hypothesis, present a theoretical rationale. That is, under what assumptions and by what logic did you arrive at this hypothesis? Be thoughtful about this. Take time to explain your reasoning carefully. Also, do this BEFORE you run the analysis and see the results -- no cheating!

4. METHODS AND DATA SOURCES: This will vary depending on whether it is a quantitative or qualitative analysis. Be explicit in either instance.

5. FINDINGS: Use this section to report the results of your analyses – and, optionally. When reporting the results of your hypothesis tests, briefly restate your hypothesis, show the findings (crosstab, scatter plot, etc.), and briefly summarize (a) what you think the results tell you, (b) whether the results are substantively and statistically significant, and (c) whether they appear to confirm or disconfirm your hypothesis. Note any interesting aspect of the results (surprises, conditional relationships, etc.).

Important: Don’t make the common mistake of thinking that only "positive" results (i.e., those that support your hypotheses) are worth reporting or will be rewarded with a good grade. If you have a thoughtful, plausible, well-formulated hypothesis and the results disconfirm it, no problem – we’ve still learned something. Report what you get, up or down, and then do your best to make sense of it. Many papers submitted for this assignment have received an A+ grade despite reporting 100% negative results. The bolder your thinking, the LESS likely you are to produce positive results.