Create a report that addresses each of the following six prompts. Length of the report doesn’t really matter, so long as each of the six prompts is sufficiently addressed. You are welcome to build upon (and even use sentences from) your Group Project 1. However, this final project should be an independent effort. Alternatively, if you'd rather start from scratch and create an entirely new research question to be answered with GSS data, you may.
To start, present your research question.
Your research question and hypotheses should be aligned with your subsequent analysis.
Justify why what you’re about to show us is interesting.
Show me (briefly) how the research question relates to some underlying theory (either a big, well-known sociological theory or a theorized pathway from one variable to another that is specific to this research question).
Very briefly and directly, summarize what has been done on this topic by prior researchers.
This literature review should constitute one or two paragraphs of your total report.
You should include at least three sources, and at least one of those three must be academic in nature (e.g. published in a peer-reviewed journal).
This review should not read like an annotated bibliography, in which you would summarize one paper, and then another, and then another. Instead, you should write a cohesive paragraph summarizing what others have done.
This paragraph probably won't include the scholars' names in the body text, and it definitely shouldn't include the name of their article or the name of the journal in which it was published! Instead, use a method of citation (e.g. footnotes, endnotes, APA) that will give proper attribution to the scholars while allowing the paragraph(s) to be full of content about research findings--not about secondary information like the studies' titles. See the bottom of this page for an example of a literature review paragraph from one of my own published articles.
At the end of this literature review, succinctly identify (one sentence) how your project builds upon (rather than repeats) those prior studies.
Methods should clearly explain:
What data you've used. For example, what dataset? From which year? Where can it be downloaded?
Your methodological approach. For example, will you use univariate descriptive statistics? Crosstabulations? Of which variables? Which statistical tests? Etc.
Next, present your results in clearly written paragraphs that describe 4-5 tables and/or graphs. See the bullet points below for more guidance on the tables/graphs.