Assignment #1: Data Collection and Analysis

Length: (4-6 pages)
Due Date: September 24, 2003

Your first assignment for this course is to undertake a small project involving data collection and analysis. Although I would like you to write up your research on your own, you may work together to design your project and to collect data. For this project, you will extend the research of a published author by refining or redefining a research question, collecting data, and writing up results. An example of this would be to extend Cameron’s discussion of the words college students use for the penis in her article, "Naming of Parts." For example, you could look at:

• what college students call female "parts"
• what names people who did not go to college use
• how people from North Dakota name these parts, etc.

Each of these projects would compare your data to Cameron’s data, and analyze what differences or similarities might mean. You need to remember, though, that academic research is typically an argument made to extend knowledge—you must take a position on what your data means, you must position your research in terms of other scholars, and you must accurately describe your research methods and their reliability.

Purpose: This paper will serve several purposes, it:

• introduces you to research methods in composition and linguistics.
• gives you a chance to understand how academic knowledge is produced by extending and testing the work of previous researchers.
• familiarizes you with the components of the genre of the academic paper.

Planning and Drafting

1. Find an article that has a research question that is of interest to you and read it very carefully to make sure you have a good understanding of:

• the research question(s) driving the research
• the research methods (or method of data collection)
• the method of data analysis
• the conclusions the author draws from the data and analysis

2. With peers, brainstorm ideas for extending the argument of an article that interests you. What research questions would help you refine the areas you wish to explore? (Hint: many scholarly articles end with a sections outlining directions for future research, in which the author describes the limitations of his/her research and outlines ways future scholars might continue the research. This is a great place to look for ideas.)

3. Develop a research question and a method of data collection that will help you collect the data you need to respond to the question.

4. Begin collecting data in the manner you have laid out.

5. Write up your research following the genre of the academic paper:

• Introduction and research question
• Review of relevant literature—you must minimally summarize and cite the research you are extending and the one or two central articles that informed that research.
• Research methods—how you collected your data
• Findings—reporting your raw data. You will outline what you found; you will want to use tables and/or transcriptions so that your reader can examine the data him/herself.
• Analysis—what your data mean, usually in close relation to the research you are attempting to extend. You will need to spin out what you’ve found to respond to your research question and extend scholarly understanding of the area you are researching. This requires a high level of synthesis—pulling together all the ideas you have introduced so far and making sense of them for your reader.
• Conclusions and directions for future research. Here you outline the extent to which you think your research has extended our understanding of your topic, and questions that arose through undertaking this research project.

6. Remember—for this and every paper you write for this class, you will be filling out and turning in a grading rubric. Read the rubric thoughtfully so that you can decide if you have adequately met the assignment’s requirements.

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