We’ve talked a little about using the Nicklay article as a model for the type of research paper we’re writing using primary research. Given the circumstances of our IRB applications, I wanted to offer some additional guidance regarding the introduction, literature review, and methods portions of the paper.
Introduction
This first section helps your reader understand why the topic is important and why you are drawn to it. Introduction sections give a broad overview of your research question. Sometimes people find it helpful to start with a story, if they have a close personal connection to the topic. Other times, introductions can be more straight forward and simply act as a way of identifying the problem/issue and helping your reader understand what you’re planning to do in the paper.
Literature Review
Remember that literature reviews are meant to give your reader an idea of the previous research done on your topic. Sometimes this research is directly related (for instance, a secondary source on the writing of Puerto Rican college students when you yourself are researching the writing of Puerto Rican college students); sometimes the research you’ll need to review is only tangentially related to your study (for example, an article on student test-taking anxiety in biology classes when you yourself are researching best practices for tutoring biology student writing assignments). The idea is to find a combination of secondary sources that show that your primary research is part of a larger scholarly conversation happening across the field of writing center studies.
As you compose the literature review, it may be helpful to keep the following things in mind:
- Think of this as a synthesis of all the secondary sources you’ve found on your topic and that you may have mentioned in your Annotated Bibliography
- Make connections amongst your sources in order to establish a clear pattern of scholarly communication about your topic
- Make connections and show how your sources speak to one another and to the primary research you’re proposing
- Cite all sources using in-text citations in APA format.
- Make sure you are answering these questions:
- As you look at these sources, what can be said about the way scholars are talking about your topic? What patterns do you notice?
- How does each author discuss your topic as opposed to the other authors in your bibliography? What are the similarities/differences?
- How do the sources complement each other? (In other words, why is this group of sources, specifically, important? Why do they belong together in a collection like the one you’re curating here?)
- What critiques do you have, as someone who cares about this topic? What could all these authors do differently in order to improve this scholarly conversation?
- In what ways do these secondary sources influence the primary research you’ll be doing?
Methods
Think of the methods section as your step-by-step instruction manual or recipe (oh hey- Elbow’s “cooking”!) for anyone who might want to duplicate your study. In this section, you’ll need to address every step of your research process in detail. What tools are you using to gather data? How are you using those tools? What participant groups are you working with and why? Where are you conducting your research? Some of those questions should seem familiar; that’s because many of the decisions you made for your IRB application need to be explained here.
