Submit a working draft of the introduction to the manuscript for the major paper. This component is an introduction and conceptual literature review that should be at least 7-10 pages and include references to at least 10 peer-reviewed journal articles (not secondary sources). This section should NOT be a simple listing of previous studies that have been conducted/what was done in those studies. Instead, following the APA guidelines for research manuscripts (APA, 2009), you should provide a conceptual overview of the topic you have selected, what is known about, and what is (still) unknown. You are building the story for the reason for the study you will eventually propose, so YOUR VOICE and your SYNTHESIS of the literature on this topic as an author must be clear in this literature review. (Hint 1: Do not begin paragraphs by mentioning a study. Start it with a thought, important point you want to make, or a question that you will address in that paragraph.). Your literature review should close with a statement of critical research questions that are of interest to you, and the specific hypotheses that you will design a study to test. (Hint 2: Every journal article begins with a literature review. Model yours after one from this class or a previous class you’ve taken that you found easy to read).
Attached are two documents you can use to help see how to organize the paper.
The document “Part 1 Lit Review, Hyp, Gap Examples” has examples of how to approach this project with either Option 1 (similar to published research) and Option 2 (dissertation format). Please note that both examples are combined in the document and scroll down to see both options.
