Statement of Intent

Your statement of intent is your first stab at describing the experiment you are going to do this semester. You begin with an idea and build with the literature. Your statement will have two parts. The first is an annotated bibliography, consisting of three empirical articles that are relevant to your project to get you started and prime you for our class that will meet at O'Leary for more info on literature searches. The second is an initial statement about what you intend to study. Directions follow.

Annotated bibliography

Each of these three articles should come from professional peer-reviewed journals. Most of them should be empirical, that is, they should be based on some type of data. You may have a theoretical paper, but no more than one at this point (and make sure you know a theoretical paper from someone’s personal or expert opinion, which doesn’t count).

Do not search for papers that directly address the topic you wish to study. You might find some that are only obliquely relevant. That’s okay. It is also understood that these might not be the final papers to which you refer in your final research report. Nor should they be all of the papers to which you refer.

For each annotation include the following”

1. The complete APA citation. Failure to cite in APA style will result in a “do-over.”

2. A one paragraph summary in your own words of what the authors tested, who and how, and what they found.

3. A notation of any relevant research instruments that were used.

4. A statement of how this study is relevant to your own.

Statement

This will be a paragraph or two. You will develop this idea much more as the semester progresses. The more information you can provide now, though, the more quickly you can progress.

You need to provide

1. Rationale: A brief background of where your idea is coming from (a mini-lit review that refers to the ideas from the articles you cite).

2. Research question: What constructs do you want to study and what relations among them?

3. Operational definitions: What will you do to estimate or assess those constructs?

4. Hypothesis: What is your best and most informed guess about what you might find?

5. Any questions you may have as a result of this exercise.

Like all assignments in this class, please hand this one in and keep it in your 1” three ring binder.

All assignments should be typed, not hand written.

Please double space, so I have room to write comments.

updated 9/8/02