Research Project

“What would a sociologist say?”

This project is divided into two parts or stages. Your overall goal is to examine a case of social inequality, to prove what is happening, and to provide an explanation from a sociological viewpoint. In essence, you will compile information from sociological sources to explain to your reader what a sociologist would probably give as an answer to the question you choose.

In this part of the project, you are going to do three main tasks. First, you will choose a question and develop a draft hypothesis related to your question. Second, you will find some preliminary sources for use in evaluating this hypothesis (sources that tested this or a similar hypothesis). Third, you will provide the bibliographic information for your sources and some notes on important information that you learned from each source you list.

Your assignment should begin by clearly stating the sociological research question you want to answer. Then, you should state your DRAFT hypothesis. You can revise your hypothesis for the second assignment, but you should stick with the same overall topic across assignments. You should then write a very brief justification of your hypothesis, providing a sociological reasoning for why you think your hypothesis shows sound reasoning. This should be a short paragraph of no more than 250 words.

You will then provide full citation information for TWO (2) scholarly, peer-reviewed sources based on sociological research. You must also list notes as to what important facts, findings, or other information come from each source that you think will be of later use. Each note should just be a sentence describing one piece of information.

Use the following checklist to determine if you have done everything you need to do for part 1:

• Did you put your name and the date at the top of the assignment, on the RIGHT side?
• Did you add page numbers to the bottom of the page? Did you state your research question?
• Did you state a draft of your hypothesis in a sentence?
• Did you give a short (max 250 word) sociological justification for your hypothesis?
• Did you provide full citation information for 2 scholarly sources in APA, MLA, or ASA format?
• Did you provide annotations (notes) for each source?

Your assignment must be submitted to the submisison link that will appear below near the due date. You must submit in one of the listed file formats. You may NOT submit by email.

EXAMPLE: You can find an explanation of annotated bibliographies as well as an example of what an annotated citation would look like (toward the bottom) at the following link

[link] https://guides.library.cornell.edu/annotatedbibliography

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Pre-Approved Research Questions