Notes 9/3/99

With much appreciation to Michelle Hsiang!!!

Topic: What makes a good honors project and thesis?

What are the elements of an Honors Project?

I. Question, of interest to you

A. How did you arrive at a good topic?

· Notice a cause and effect, find relationships, a link, an implicit comparison

· Example: comparison of one variable in two samples- mental health in incarcerated/non-incarcerated youths

· Potential of making an academic contribution, can be observational

· Posed in such a way so that you can obtain evidence

· Hypothesis is refutable, i.e. evidence must be able to directly address the hypothesis- can be general or specific

B. Getting at an answerable question, focusing down

· Manageability

· Timeline

· Getting help, mentorship

· Background research, lit reviews, research is an outgrowth of previous work

· Begin writing at the onset

· ***you need to think about statistics as you design your research***

II. Collection of data

III. Objective analysis of data

Statistics-

· supportive, don’t overstate, safeguard from deluding ourselves

· helps you establish something as a fact, allows you to build support to your notion

· allows you to comb through immense amount of data

· allows you to deal w/ surprises

IV. Presentation of original research-oral and written form

A. Elements of a thesis

1. Title, keep in mind to use keywords

2. Title page, page numbers, name, date, maybe an image…appearance is important

3. Acknowledgments- where your sources of support are

4. Table of contents, even in early drafts, use appropriate divisions

5. Abstract- like outline but still useful, make brief and cover key points, dense, try to make catchy, should follow logic of the paper

6. Introduction- includes objective/justification, significance/global approach, a motivation for reader, shows where research is going

7. Background- literature review

· look at research from several different areas

· Lit reviews at beginning of research cover broad/large ideas, then you funnel down to specific sources more specific to your question

· Have a copy--electronic or hard—of all sources

· Be wary of plagiarism

· Lit reviews along w/ empirical research leads you to sub-questions that guide your analysis, this part of research requires the most thinking, focus on several parallel hypotheses

8. Method

· Where the heart of your paper is

· Measures

· Tedious, but easy to write

· If you are doing social science research refer to “Content an Organization of a Manuscript” and “Writing the Empirical Journal Article” handouts

· Do not need to include standard procedures

· Talk about your population –people or cells

· Put statistical methodology

· When you deviate from a standard, specify how you deviated so that someone else can replicate results

· Can use appendices

· Note that you achieved Human Subjects Approval; for labwork, make sure animal subjects approval is subsumed by lab’s work

9. Results

· flows from your methods

· limitations of research

· put just data, do not include interpretation of data

· present data in tabular/graphical format, have blurbs to point out the important points in the graph, try to keep in text rather than in appendix

· include statistical results

· storyline: quickly restate the question, technique you used, then organize data around questions, then does it answer the question

10. Discussion, conclusions, implications

· At this point, logic may already be clear so may be short

· Explain why things didn’t work

a. Have a narrow section on what this result means, a conclusion that is supported by the data

b. Open the funnel, section that goes beyond your data, back to introduction into a cosmic question, more speculative

i. Future experiments

ii. Policy implications

iii. limitations, state but don’t apologize

iv. strong section by why this research was important

11. References, bibliography

· Don’t use popular press (except for interest, or to show influence), need a primary source

· Includes sources that you cited

· Can use Endnote (good investment, costs about $85, see if Stanford has a site license), differs in social and biological research, saves a lot of time

· Cite throughout text

V. Other options

· Appendices

· Glossary

· keywords

VI. Other key points

· clear communication at every level, interact w/ peers and mentors

· excitement enthusiasm to get you through valleys!!

· Being involved w/ faculty-have at least 3 readers

· In write-up, be aware of what goes in each section

· Can use appendices for data and methodology

· On significance-statistically significant, biologically significant, meaningful; lack of statistical significance does not mean it is insignificant

Bob's Home Page