1. tues, feb 5, 2012 analyzing scholarly journal articles

2. Steps in research processSections of journal article Identify topic focusIntroduction Hypothesis or research questionsPurpose of the study Explore previous research in the area Literature review Design a study to address the research questions or test the hypothesis Methods / research design Collect dataData collection Analyze dataFindings Draw some conclusionsAnalysis / conclusions

3. Sections of journal article Abstract120 words; quick review of contents Introduction Introduces us to the overall issue/problem under consideration; justifies importance of study Purpose of the studyResearch questions; hypothesis Literature review Review past and related research (synthesized not one-by- one Methods / research design / data collection Detailed description of how the study was conducted; recipe with an exact description for replication; participants, demographics, ethics, materials, measures, procedure Findings / results Statistical reporting of data; describes what was found after analyzing the data; charts and graphs Discussion Reviews, interprets and evaluates the results using no statistics; discuss similarities and differences between the current findings and findings of previous research Analysis / conclusions Identify weaknesses/limitations of study; suggestions for future research

5. undergraduates as research subjects: what do you think? Psychologists claim to speak of human nature, the study argues, but they have mostly been telling us about a group of WEIRD outliers, as the study calls them — Westernized, educated people from industrialized, rich democracies. According to the study, 68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner. Western psychologists routinely generalize about “human” traits from data on this slender subpopulation, and psychologists elsewhere cite these papers as evidence. Henrich, J. Heine, S.J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.