This paper may be a bit different from other papers you’ve written because it will be based primarily on your own data analysis rather than a synthesis and appraisal of previous research. Because you are conducting your own empirical research, you will need to discuss some issues that don’t ordinarily come up in other paper assignments. For instance, you will need to explain your hypotheses and specify the expected relationships between independent and dependent variables. You will have to explain any recoding of variables that you might do. You will also need to lend some interpretation to the relationships you observe in your contingency table analyses. The difference between an adequate paper and a genuinely good paper will turn in large measure on how you tackle such tasks.
Intro: Statement of Purpose
Describe the general topic of your paper (attitudes toward abortion, the gender gap in presidential voting)
Provide some justification for the project. Why are you interested in this topic?
What are your specific research question(s)? What are your hypotheses?
Review of Previous Research
Provide a context or setting for your project.
Describe previous research related to your topic in a coherent and systematic way.
Research Methodology
Discuss the specific ANES survey questions you intend to examine. What are your dependent variable, your primary independent variable, and your control variable?
Explain how well your variables measure the concepts represented in your study. Are there any weaknesses or shortcomings in the measures you are employing?
If you recoded the variable(s). How did you do it?
How many people have you interviewed? How diverse were they? How were the interviews conducted (in-person, telephone…)?
Results
Explain the crosstabulations that you have done
Describe and analyze the results in your tables
Are the results consistent with your hypotheses? Are your results surprising? How so? Are your results similar to or different from previous findings in the literature? How so?
Discuss the findings from supplement interviews. How do they enhance your understanding of contingency table analysis results?
5. Discussion and Conclusion
Try to offer some explanation and interpretation of your findings. What are the implications of your findings?
Why are your findings interesting or important? What do they tell us about the state of current American politics? How would you suggest continuing this line of study in the future?
6. Appendix
Contingency tables (Create tables in MS Excel that show the column percentages, column totals in parentheses at the bottom of each column, chi-square, and p-value)
Round the column percentages to 1 decimal place.
7 References
APA style
