Fall, 2005 (Roos, Soc. 501)

Assignment 4: Analytic literature review (due Tuesday, November 22nd)

Now's the time to get thee to a library to orient your final project sociologically. Look for articles or books that address the substantive issues you have raised. What sociological literature(s) is(are) relevant to help you frame your statistical investigations? I don't expect that you'll have a fully developed literature review for this assignment, but I do expect that by your final project you'll address at least 7-10 relevant articles/books.

For this assignment, you don't need a fully developed intro, just an analytic literature review. But, if you don't include a fuller intro, make sure you at least provide a paragraph to re-orient me to the larger project. You have several weeks to accomplish all this, so make substantial progress toward your final project. If you do it right, you'll be able to weave your literature review into your developing paper without too much angst.

To write an analytic review, don't just review what X, Y, and Z say about your topic. There is nothing more boring. Rather use previous literature to develop your own argument. Evaluate (don't just describe) how others' work helps you to organize your own ideas. How do you build on previous research? How does previous research lead you to expectations about the relationships among your variables? Ultimately, you'll use your review to structure your introduction, talk about methods in the methods section, and frame your results in the analysis section. So this step in the process is a very important one.

Continue on in your spare time running data that will be relevant to your final project. Try other trivariate relationships. Are there any relevant 4-variable crosstabs that you should try? Watch out for small n's in columns, as an indicator of when to collapse, or when to stop adding variables. In general, however, you don't need to recode a dependent variable to fewer than 7 to 8 categories (check with me if you have any questions).

Additional help: Ch. 14 and Appendexes B-D in Schutt can give you some hints on how to research and write a research report. Also Miller can be invaluable (esp. Chs. 11-12). Check out some recent journal articles (e.g., American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Work and Occupations). Finally, check out the last section of the syllabus for additional resources: "Research, Thinking, and Writing" (especially Clarke, on writing and criticism).

Assignments must be typed.