Posted: August 2nd, 2015

Research Paper

Research Paper 1

For this project, you will identify a communication phenomenon that you typically observe on a daily (or almost-daily) basis. For instance, you may choose flirting, children’s interaction on a playground, customers’ requests at a store, greeting behaviors, or use of social media. Once you have identified your phenomenon, search for scholarly research on your topic (you may want to start with a few phenomena as options to make sure you can find one that has plenty of available research). Your first paper will describe some of the relevant research on the subject and will pose a question or hypothesis that you will investigate in a journal you will keep for Week 3 of the course.

For Research Paper 1

1. Choose a topic for your paper. Remember that this topic must be (1) a communication phenomenon that is (2) observable in your everyday life and (3) described in existing scholarly research.
2. Gather scholarly articles related to your topic. You’ll need at least five journal articles for this rationale.
3. Read the articles, and synthesize the findings from those articles to explain what we know about your topic and why it would be interesting to study this topic by observing people in the public venue that you’ve chosen. Note that simply providing a paragraph summary of each article is not sufficient. Instead, read the articles and make an argument about what we know about this phenomenon, referring to the various articles to support your main points.
4. Write the paper. This should be written in a formal, third-person style. It will begin with an introduction that tells why the topic you’ve chosen is interesting or important. Then, the bulk of the paper will explain what the research tells us about the topic. It will conclude with a summary and a statement of the hypothesis or question you will investigate with your daily journal for the following week.
5. Make sure that you are citing sources appropriately and that you have included an APA-style reference page.

Your paper should be approximately 5 pages long (excluding title page and references) and should follow APA style. The 5 scholarly sources should be cited in the text of the paper and included in the references page. Submit the paper via Canvas.