research organizations like pew ). remember H u m a n i t i e s

My paper topic is Social factors that make media being biased

To that end, the Research Paper contains the following, required items:

1. Introduction
2. Literature Review of differing perspectives on your topic
3. Summative integration and reflection on the ways the disciplines can work together
4. Conclusion
5. References

Each of these components break down as follows:

1. Introduction (aim for 1/2 to 3/4 page)
   1. The introduction will serve to introduce the topic and idea to your audience (i.e. Stephanie and me). In this case, you need to construct an introduction that motivates an interest in the topic as well as introduces the basic necessities of understanding to your reader. To that end, your introduction should focus primarily on your issue of interest (the pay gap, for example).
   2. Make sure there is a clear thesis of what your overall paper that situates your topic clearly and highlights that you’re presenting various viewpoints on this topic.
   3. It should give some insight into the components that underlie that issue (define it, give a bit of history on it, and also present basic statistics for it, which you can obtain through places like newspaper articles or research organizations like Pew).
      1. Remember: the introduction motivates the reader to want to know more, so it needs to stay focused on the issue that you want to address. If you have an annual review article, it can give you some great basic details for your introduction.
2. Literature Review (aim for about two-thirds of a page for each discipline here, so about 4 pages total)
   1. For your literature review, you must use a minimum of 6 peer-reviewed, academic research articles. The literature review serves to fine tune your point further and helps you to focus on where you are most specifically interested, namely the key concepts, factors, and variables that you think influence the problem you are trying to understand.
      1. Five of the articles will come from the standalone disciplines. You can choose any of the five that you’d like. So, you’re picking five from: History, Political Science, Economics, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, and Geography.
      2. One article must be explicitly interdisciplinary.
   2. For example, say you were interested in EDM festivals. For research articles, you can consider that the differing disciplines may look something like the following:
      1. Anthropologists would likely do an ethnography of festivals to build out an understanding of the cultural facets of attendance
      2. Economists could centralize a focus on the ways in which festivals are beneficial to local economies or the ways in which scalped festival tickets signal that base ticket prices can increase.
      3. Political scientists may focus on the ways local municipalities respond to and create rules and limits on festival growth/expansion.
      4. Psychologists could investigate the nature of euphoria and happiness that festival attendance induces.
      5. Sociologists may investigate issues of access to see who can and who can’t attend.
      6. The interdisciplinary approach is obviously more of a wild card depending upon what sorts of disciplines are being integrated.
         1. One way to think of this is to look for areas that are explicitly interdisciplinary in their approach: Ethnic Studies, Visual Studies, Media Studies, Informatics, Legal Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, etc. all tend to draw from a variety of disciplines in their approaches. Even if they’ve institutionalized into specific departments, degree programs, organizations, journals, and more, their roots are explicitly interdisciplinary.
   3. For this section, you’re welcome to break it down into subsections alongside the differing disciplines.
3. Summative integration (aim for about 1 page here)
   1. This section is a space for you to address the ways in which these differing disciplines provide a more holistic vantage point on your topic. Because of this, you need to take what you’ve learned throughout the course, combined with the specific literature you’ve assembled, to explain how and why the differing vantages combined offer the best opportunity for understanding your given topic.
   2. Work to make sure they integrate cleanly, clearly, and
4. Conclusion (aim for about .5 page here)
   1. The conclusion reiterates your main research question and really offers the moment that you can fully make sure that everything brought home, as it were. You’re not merely reiterating exactly what you just said. Rather, you’re using it to make sure your reader understands the full ideas and implications. You should also articulate what it doesn’t address and that future papers can integrate to understand the topic more fully.
   2. Do not take this section lightly as it is the section that signifies explicitly the purpose of this survey course.
5. References
   1. In addition to using in-text citations, you must also have a references list. Use whichever citation method you want but it must be applied correctly and uniformly!