Introduction and Literature Review Draft
( use at least 5+ references from peer-reviewed journals)

Using literature relevant to your research question, introduce your topic of interest, making an argument for why your topic matters and why you ask your research question. Your writing should be technical, clear, and to the point, avoiding unnecessary repetition.

Your introduction/literature review should be a well-documented discussion of what the community of scholars in sociology (or related social science disciplines such as psychology, economics, or political science) have to say about the topic you are studying.  The annotated bibliography you did for part 2 of the course project will be helpful here, but you will most likely need to gather some additional articles and/or scholarly books on the topic.

In your review of the literature, you should move from broad statements about your topic generally to literature that is directly relevant to your particular narrow study topic.

This review should logically lead into a presentation of what your research question and hypotheses are and provide a rationale (based on prior research or theories) why you hypothesize the relationship you do.  You should avoid simply regurgitating the findings of one study or the other, but rather SYNTHESIZE (compare and contrast) existing research to help build your argument.

*You should be discussing research that relates to BOTH your Dependent Variable(s) and Independent Variable(s).

Make sure to go look at published research articles as examples for how to concisely synthesize literature related to your research question.

Cite all your references at the end of your draft using ASA format. Make sure to use ASA in-text citations throughout your paper. For more info on proper ASA citation, look back at the module on literature reviews.