Questions We Can Help You To Answer

Paper instructions:

Read the article “Measuring Community Participation of Adults with Psychiatric Disabilities: Reliability of Two Modes of Data Collection” (available through the Shapiro Library). Then, in a short paper, briefly describe each of the parts of the research listed below (see APA manual, pages 25, 27–35, and 37). Be explicit. Include specific examples from your reading to incorporate reliability, validity, and measurement in your answers.

Introduction
Describe the problem being investigated.
State the research hypothesis.
Define any new research terms.
What does this study have to do with reliability?

Method
Briefly describe how the research was conducted, specifically addressing what was intended to be measured.
Who were the participants, and how were they selected?
Identify the independent and dependent variables.

Results
What were the research findings?
What statistics were included in this section?
Did the authors report any reliability data for their measures? What were they? Did you note construct validity in this experiment? If so, what type?

Discussion
Did the research findings support the hypothesis?
Was the research reliable? Why or why not?
Did the study list any suggestions for improvement and replication?

Conclusion
Paraphrase the research conclusion in 150–250 words.

Reference
Write the APA-style reference for this article.

Analysis
What did this article teach you about test-retest reliability? How was what you read related to what you studied this week?


FeedBack From Last Paper; 
Here are a few writing style notes we should go over.  I tried to catch most of them in your papers, but cannot guarantee that I have caught them all.

Please pay attention to your grammar.  Be mindful of your tense (do not switch between present and past).  Many of you had awkward sentences.  One thing you can do to help with this is to read your papers out loud.  If you find that you are stumbling over what you are saying, then you should definitely consider revising.  Be precise in your language use.  Do not use fancy words unless you need to.  Be judicious in your words choices.  Many times I cross-check words with the dictionary and thesaurus to settle upon the word that has the most accurate meaning for what I am trying to convey.  Avoid anthropomorphizing things.  If you do not know what this means, ask me.

A reminder about paragraph structure.  Paragraphs start with a thesis statement (the point on the paragraph), are followed by some supporting statements, and then are generally wrapped up in some way.  Paragraphs should not be a page (or more!) in length -- those are typically too long and need to be broken up.  The same idea goes for the entire flow of the paper.  You are trying to convey a story or logical argument to me.  That means that your ideas should follow one after the other.  For each paragraph, write out what the main point of it is and then put all of your main points together.  This should form a logical structure.  Try to look at it and think about what might be missing.  If you were an outsider reading this paper, what is it that you would want to know.

Pet peeve of mine ... "While" and how to use it.  Please see this http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2011/05/properly-using-while.html (copy-and-paste this into a brower).  Many times you are using "while" when you should be using "although" or "whereas".
Quotes...each of you are intelligent individuals.  Please do not quote anything unless you have to.  You can paraphrase things, putthing the ideas into your own words.  Your papers should NOT consist largely of quotes.  They should be your own ideas and supported by the literature.  Even when giving me a definition of a concept...you DO NOT need to give me a quote from a book.  Describe it in your own words and provide me with the citation. Quotes are incredibly distracting.  Think of how many scientific articles you have read just for this class (including the book) and how many quotes are used.  I suspect, not very many. <-- This is not something that I consistently saw, but is a rule of thumb you should try to abide by in your every day writing (including discussion board posts).

Finally, be mindful of proper APA format.  Some of you received a lot of feedback regarding format.  Look at what I did and if you do not know how I did what I did, please ask me.  I understand that you do not always have access to your APA book (I know that I don't!).  I am providing a great resource that you should definitely consider using when referencing proper format: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/10/ (copy-and-paste into a browser).