Research Question: Do smokers have an increased risk of severe Covid symptoms and hospitalization following Covid 19 infection than non-smokers in 2020 in the United States?
Introduction (problem descriiption and significance, purpose statement, research questions)
Now that have your research question, you will write and submit a page and a half:
The Introduction section of your project paper. Examples https://www.belmont.edu/Nursing/pdf/APA/2014SampleAPAResearch.pdf & Introduction.pdf
This section will include a brief descriiption of the problem ( highlight data on the issue, for example, research shows teen pregnancy has increased among the minority population by 25% in the last 5 years despite interventions targeted to minority teenage girls)
Significance: Why addressing this issue is important- again highlight data that supports it
Purpose statement: what your research team plan to do that contributes to solving the problem
Research question: State your research question as an objective of your research
Cite your references using APA format and Refworks reference manager
Peer-reviewed articles references should be within the last five years.
A short descriiption of the introduction follows. Please note that this is only one way to think about the introduction and that in many cases, these functions are not separated in the writing, but are often integrated or overlapped.
Outline the topic background and/or discuss the motivation for the research. This is the minimum information needed to help the reader get familiar with what we will be talking about, and also, why we, as authors and researchers chose to explore our topic. The background frames the most general boundary of the article and should be accessible to even the most uninformed reader. It is helpful then if the information used here is either interesting or has clear importance to most people.
Outline the academic background and identify the gap in literature. This is usually the longest part of the introduction, and might take the most time to compose. We need to relate to the reader what the most relevant and up-to-date research has to say about our topic, and also identify what is missing from this body of research. We can think of this as the academic justification or purpose behind our research, to convince our reader that our findings are novel. Science writers often make the mistake of going into too much detail about specific studies, or simply listing sentences about others’ research. The goal rather is to use the sources to tell the reader the academic story so far concerning our research area, and show them that the story is incomplete.
State the research problem, question, hypothesis or objective of the research. This is the core of our introduction—what we are actually doing or did for our research—and might be the shortest but most important part of the writing. It needs to be clear, detailed, and concise. It is likely going to be the most information-dense part of the introduction (1–2 sentences long), and should answer the what, why, when, how, who, and where questions of our study. Extremely precise and unambiguous language is required here as the research problem statement has a direct relationship to the methodology, results and discussion sections. For the reader to continue on understanding our paper, they need to be properly informed of the technical parameters of our research.
Explain the social impact. This should identify how your research might be important outside of filling a gap in academic knowledge. That is, how might the new knowledge gained by your research specifically help patients or the medical community or society in general. Too often this function is overlooked by writers who take for granted that the reader can understand how your findings might be applied in the “real world”. Explaining this clearly for your reader can immediately make your research more interesting, relevant, accessible and significant.
Describe how you plan to answer the research question. This is essentially describing what the basic methodology is. This does not need to be very detailed, and can be generally reduced to a mention of the methodology type (meta-analysis, systematic review, prospective study, retrospective study etc.). Often, this can be addressed within the research problem statement itself.
Significant results. More often than not, the results do not appear in the introduction, and perhaps should not, depending on whom you ask, or perhaps the publisher whom you are submitting to. If the results are presented in the introduction, they should only include the findings most relevant to answering the research question, and should be clearly, and succinctly stated.
