CUNY Internship and Study
Abroad in Moldova 2013
CUNY Internship and Study
Abroad in Moldova 2013
Subtitle
NATURE AND SCOPE OF THE COURSE:
The goal of this course is for the student to have the experience of doing in-depth research into a narrowly focused area of Psychology and Culture. Your project will involve some library research but it will mostly be field research involving the collection of new data. The topic of your research project and your research design will be worked out by you and the professor, Dr. Rodgers.
REQUIRED TEXTBOOK
You will need the following book for the course.
Russell H. Bernard
2002 Research Methods in Anthropology. California: Sage Publications, 3rd edition.
Author Biography: H. RUSSELL BERNARD is professor of anthropology at the University of Florida. A expert on research methods, on writing and publishing in previously non-written languages, and on social network analysis, he is author of half a dozen books and editor of the journal Field Methods.
WRITING INTENSIVE COURSE:
Sometimes this is offered as a Writing Intensive course, which means that at least 50% of your grade will be based on written work. Initial drafts of certain portions of your paper will have to be submitted beforehand for comments. You will then be required to re-write and edit these sections of your paper.
EXAMS:There are no exams in this course. A written research paper of 25 to 30 typed, double-spaced pages not counting references is required.
FINAL PAPER DUE DATE:
See the Reading & Assignment Schedule for when individual assignments and you final paper is due. The paper should be sent to me as an attachment to an email message. The attached paper should be in Word or Rich Text Format (If you do not use Word, most word processing programs will save a file in a *.rtf format). Late papers will be downgraded.
GRADING:
Your grade will be based 100% on your paper. Grades of "ABS" (absent from the final) will not be given. “Incomplete” grades will also generally not be given (In any case, they will never be given without a signed letter from a physician, although such a letter does not guarantee that an INC grade will be assigned). If I do not have completed work by the last day of classes for the semester, I will assign a grade based on my assessment of the work done.
PAPER FORMATING:The paper should be written in the style of the current edition of the APA Manual, 6th edition (APA = American Psychological Association).
PAPER TOPICS:
The topic of study is the student's responsibility, although in certain cases the instructor may suggest a topic. It is also assumed that the student has advanced standing or has taken at least two anthropology courses. Exceptions to this are possible, but an independent course is generally not a course for a freshman. All topics must be discussed and approved by the instructor. You will have wide latitude as to topic. The only requirement is that it relates to anthropology. I have found that student topics are often too general or sweeping in scope for a single semester. Thus, through discussion we can limit and focus your topic to a manageable semester project, as well as clarify and focus the ideas involved.
From your previous readings or classes you should have developed a research topic you wish to explore. It is a good general practice that while you are reading it is good to keep in mind that you are also looking for a paper topic. As you read you will come across a topic, hypothesis or the author's theory that interests you. STOP immediately and write it down on the inside back cover of the book or in a special notebook. If you do this, by the time you are half-way through the book you will have several possible topics which we can discuss. I must approve the topic you select. I am not so concerned about what your topic is as I am in helping you to focus it and pare it down to something you can complete in a semester.
Once we have focused on your topic, I will help you in finding relevant literature for your topic, and I will show you how to do an online computer literature search. I will also suggest libraries and reference indexes that may be useful to you in finding bibliography for your topic.
ADVISEMENT AND COUNSELING:
Advisement and counseling is extremely important in any course, but it is essential in a course that is a TBA (Hours to be arranged) course. Students differ in ability to work on their own, especially in self discipline and organization. Some students may have the best intentions but they have been away from school for so long that they forgot basic study skills or perhaps never learned them to begin with. To put it simply, stay in touch with the professor. How often you should see me varies with each student and at what stage you are at with respect to the course projects. If you are not sure what you should be doing or of what you are doing, see me very often. I am your best resource. I will not do your work for you but do not be afraid to come for assistance. I am always available by email and telephone.
I need to know what you are doing at each stage of your project. This is for your benefit. If you are going off on an unproductive tangent, I can catch it before you waste too much effort. Also, if you are falling behind, I can see it and assist you to get started again. To really learn from this experience, and to really enjoy it as well, you will like it more if you spend several hours each week on your research project including reading of relevant material. This is not a course you can cram for in the last few weeks of the semester. I suggest you set aside three or four multiple hour blocks of time (about three hours long) two or three times each week to do the work for this course. You should also know that if I do not see much of you during the semester, and you show up with a paper at the end of the semester, I will not be very impressed. Take that as a word to the wise.
GUIDELINES FOR LITERATURE REVIEW SUMMARIES:
The first task of a literature review is to locate references to prior work or discussions of your research topic. The second task is to read these references to gain expertise about the research problem. From this you will learn what hypotheses and work has already been done and what the results are. You will also become aware of competing theories or hypotheses about the research problem, and from your new knowledge of the subject, you should be able to distinguish relevant and significant hypotheses to test, or to develop your own hypotheses based on your interpretation of the arguments in the literature.
The literature review will form a section of your written research report. Thus it is useful to write short summaries of the articles you read in a way that they may become part of your final report. You will not use every summary you write in your final report: some you will discard, and some you will collapse with several other summaries into a single paragraph.
You will need to give a full bibliographic citation for each reference you summarize. It is best to list the bibliographic reference on the top of the page for each summary. List it in the format used in the "References Cited" section at the
end of your report. Thus if you use the citation, you can block it in your summary in the "Literature Review" section and move it to the "References Cited" section.
FORMATTING THE BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCE:
Only summaries written on a computer are acceptable. Reviews should be approximately 1/2 to one page long, slightly longer for articles really relevant to your topic. The top of the review's first page should contain the following information in the following format:
(General example)
Author’s Name
Year of Publication Title of the book City of publication, Publisher or Journal Name, Volume #, pages #-#.
(Example of a book reference)
Divale, William
1984 Matrilocal Residence In Pre-Literate Societies. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.
(Example of a journal article reference and multiple authors)
Sonjia Kenya, Robert Fullilove, John Allegrante, William Divale, and Mitchell Brodsky
2003 Effects of Immigration on Select Risk Behaviors of Black College Students. Journal of American
College Health 52(3): 113-120
Divale, William and Clifford Zipin
1977 Hunting and the Development of Sign Language: A Cross-Cultural Test. Journal of Anthropological
Research 33:185-201.
ORGANIZING THE SUMMARY:
There are many ways to summarize an article or book. The following are some points you should cover.
What is the major theory, thesis or theme of the study?
- What is the primary hypothesis being tested? Hypotheses usually have an “If A, then B structure” to them.
- What are the concepts that make up the hypotheses? For example, if the variable is Child Abuse, how does the author define child abuse?
- How were the variables measured? How did the author measure the concept, e.g., Present/Absent, Absent/Rare/Frequent, etc.
- If some of the variables come from other studies, what are they?
- What is the sample used?
- What are the primary statistical results? Was a statistically significant difference found? Was the correlation between the two different variables strong or weak?
- What does the author(s) conclude?
Put the above in paragraph form. It should take about ½ to ¾ of a page to do it for one article. If the article is important to your study, then go into the analysis in more detail and take more space. You may begin by mentioning the author or authors names and reference it to your references cited section. For example, you might start with something like the following:
Thompson, Caroline and Doornail Jones
1990 Religiosity, Welfare, and Work. Journal of Catholic Social Workers vol. 28:(2)268-281.
Thompson and Jones (1990) tested the relationship between religious beliefs and welfare. Their major hypothesis was that there was an inverse relationship between religious beliefs and activity and time spent on welfare. They theorized that the stronger a person's religious beliefs were, the less time they spent on welfare. The study was conducted in St. Louis. They randomly sampled 200 females between 28 and 30 years of age from the welfare rolls of ward 18 in St. Louis. Subjects were
given a questionnaire which contained a religiosity scale, questions on frequency of church attendance, education, and scales on self-esteem. Two measure of welfare dependency were made: the percentage of the last ten years spent receiving welfare assistance, and the longest single continuous period in months on welfare assistance.
Thompson and Jones' hypothesis was supported (1990:102-103). There were significant inverse correlations between religiosity and both months on welfare (Spearman's Rho = -.56, P = .02, N = 193) and percent of time on welfare (Spearman's Rho = -.67, P = .01, N = 196). They also found that women who went to church twice a week spent significantly less time on welfare then women who did not. The churchgoers also tended to have fewer children (2.3 versus 4.5 on welfare) and the difference was statistically significant by a t-test.
In the paragraphs above the hypothesis is in italic font. The Independent Variable is in italics and underlined, and the Dependent Variable is in italics.