YOUR RESEARCH PAPER

LENGTH- The paper should be about twenty pages, typed double spaced. That will include all parts of the paper, including the tables.

COVER SHEET should have the title of your paper, centered just above the middle of that page. Your name should be centered under the title. At the bottom right of the page, put the instructor's name, the name of the course, and the semester.

1) Introduction- discuss the importance of your subject. Discuss your initial expectations. Example of gender gap in presidential voting--why are women voting slightly more Democratic than are men? Why is this subject important? Why do you think this female Democratic bias is occurring?

2) Your model and hypotheses. List all five of your hypotheses, and draw your model.

Example of a model and its hypotheses:
Assume that sex is the earliest, independent variable; presidential vote is the latest, dependent variable; ideology and income are the two intervening variables located between sex and vote.

GENDER.....(H1).......> Ideology .....(H2).....> PRESIDENTIAL
Male or...................(H3)..............................> VOTE
Female.....(H4)........> Income ......(H5)........> (D or R)

The hypotheses are:
H1: Women are more likely to be liberal, compared to men.
H2: Liberals are more likely to vote Democratic for President, compared to conservatives.
H3: Women are more likely to vote Democratic for President, compared to men.
H4: Women are more likely to have lower incomes, compared to men.
H5: Lower income people are more likely to vote Democratic for president, compared to higher income people.

3) Literature review. The heading LITERATURE REVIEW should be centered on the page. Need at least 10 academic sources. The articles should be grouped by hypothesis, even if you must discuss the same article more than once. For my on-line bibliography of articles since 1975 in four political science journals, click here. Citation should not use footnotes; just put the author's last name and year in parenthesis at the end of the sentence or paragraph where their article is discussed. If you use the name of the author in your sentence, just put the year of the article in parenthesis after the author's name.
Example: Shaffer and Burnside (1997) found that Dole carried Mississippi because of his greater conservatism compared to Clinton.
Example: One study found that Dole carried Mississippi because of his greater conservatism compared to Clinton (Shaffer and Burnside, 1997).
Plagiarism:Always use your own words when writing your paper, and when summarizing the work of other people. If you ever copy someone else's work or words, put those words in quotation marks, and indicate what page they appeared on.
Example: "A major problem for Clinton continued to be his inability to shed the liberal image of the national Democratic Party," concluded Shaffer and Burnside (1997: 104).

4) Methods section. The heading METHODS should be centered on the page. Provide information for each of the years of the Mississippi Poll that you are using. For information about the polls, click here.

EXAMPLE OF METHODS SECTION IN PAPER

To test the hypotheses in my model, I used the 1998 telephone survey conducted by the Survey Research Unit of the Social Science Research Center at Mississippi State University. A random sampling technique was used to select the households, and a random method was employed to select one individual in each household to interview. Six hundred eight adult Mississippi residents were interviewed from April 14 to April 26, 1998. The response rate was 64%. The sample was adjusted by demographic characteristics (education, sex, race, adults, phone numbers) to ensure that all social groups were adequately represented in the survey. Census data for 1996 were used to obtain population estimates for education, and census data from 1990 were used for race and sex population estimates. With 608 people surveyed, the sample error is plus or minus 4%, which means that if every Mississippi resident had been interviewed, the results could differ from those reported here by as much as 4%.

5) Findings. The heading FINDINGS should be centered on the page. Bivariate tables come first. Test each of your 5 hypotheses using crosstabs. Compare percentages using complete sentences, which test your hypotheses. Mention the direction of the relationship, the magnitude of the relation using gamma or average percentage difference, and statistical significance level using chi-squared. Also, draw all tables and provide variable and value labels, and column percents and column N sizes, but put the tables at the end of the paper.

TABLE 3

GENDER DIFFERENCES IN PRESIDENTIAL VOTE

Gamma = -.21
Chi-squared < .05
Note: Percentages total 100% down each column.
Source: 1998 Mississippi Poll, conducted by Mississippi State University.

Example of text paragraph:

Hypothesis 3 of my model states that women will be more likely to vote Democratic for president, compared to men. In the 1998 Mississippi Poll, 50% of women indicated that they intended to vote for Democrat Al Gore, compared to only 39% of men who indicated an intended Democratic vote (Table 3). Hence, the hypothesis is upheld, as women are more likely than men to express an intention to vote Democratic. The magnitude of the relationship is 11%, which is the percentage difference between men and women in their likelihood of voting Democratic. The gamma statistic measuring the magnitude of this relationship is -.21, indicating that women are less likely to vote for Republican Bush, compared to men. This relationship between gender and the vote is statistically significant at the .05 level, as the Chi-squared statistic is significant at the .04 level.

6) Findings- multivariate. At least control for your two intervening variables. Provide information listed in 5. What do these multivariate tables tell you about which of the variables is important in influencing the dependent variable, and about how important each is. You should have a separate table for each category of each of your control variables; do not put the results for all categories of a control variable into one table the way the SPSS output does, since it is too hard to read.

7) Conclusions. The heading CONCLUSIONS should be centered on the page. Redraw your model, discuss your findings and literature, suggestions for future research.

8) References. The heading REFERENCES should be centered at the top of a new page. Alphabetize your references by authors' last name. Give full citations for scholarly articles, books, and other citations. See any of the PAR articles on the syllabus for specific examples.

9) Your tables should go at the end of the paper, and start on a new page. You can have more than one table on a page, but never break one table up between two different pages. Use the format provided in the table above.