The font should be Arial or Times New Roman 12 point. There should be a reference section and you must commit to only one citation style. You may choose which. You must cite 2-3 peer reviewed articles. Your conclusion/discussion should talk about 1-5 questions that you would ask participants in future research. These questions should be based on what you have observed in your data.
Breakdown of sections:
Section 1. Introduction
In your introduction, you may include the context of the issue and talk about the importance of the topic by explaining the impact it has on social life and/or by describing in detail what the issue is and why it is important to study it. You may also briefly mention the theory or concept that you will be using as a lens to analyze your findings (you will explain this further in the theoretical framework). You may briefly mention what data you have (the text or video from the media or news) and that you will do a “thematic analysis,” which means identifying in the data the themes that are most salient. Your research statement or research question should be clearly stated in this section so your readers know what your research hopes to discover.
Sections 2 and 3. Literature review and theoretical framework
You may talk about the literature on your subject that you learned about from the academic articles that you found through the library and reviewed. You can then draw from the chapter you are focused on from the textbook to build the theoretical framework.
Section 4. Methods
In this section, you will explain what your data are. Questions you can answer are: Where are the texts/videos from? Are they all from the same source? What audiences would typically access this source? If they are from different sources, how did you choose the sources and how did you find them?
Section 5. Analysis
This is a bit like a show and tell of your observations of the data. You should read the texts from the media (your data) several times to identify what you see in them. You may ask, how is the issue described? Who are the people affected by it or the people causing it described? What sort of solutions, difficulties, and needs related to the issue are mentioned? What are the differences in the answers to these questions that you see among the 2-3 data pieces? Show AT LEAST THREE samples from the data to illustrate your observations.
Section 6. Discussion
Explain how the themes that you found in the data relate to the concepts and theories from the textbook and how they expand, support, or contradict what the peer-reviewed articles say about the issue. Discuss how the patterns you see in the data affect the lives of people. Explain how you think asking questions to people in a future study could help you answer further your research question.
