Rippling Effects
Order Description
For this assignment, you will summarize the sections of one APUS peer-reviewed, evidence-based journal article from the APUS Online Library that is related to group behavior Expert opinion, essay style articles or articles which summarize multiple studies are not permitted.
Read your article through before starting your summary. In your assignment submission you will be summarizing the following:
What the authors of the article researched with their study.
Here you need to be detailed enough that a reader knows what you are describing but not get into details of how the study was done and what the results were.
The research method (survey administration, case study review, recording observations of behavior in either natural or laboratory settings, direct interviews of study participants, a combination of more than one method, etc.) used by your article’s author(s).
Here again you want to focus on the method used and not getting into what results it produced.
Names and descriptions (or just descriptions if names are not provided in the article) of measures used to gather data during the study. Keep in mind that here you are identified what was used, not describing how it was used. An example of a measure used to gather data is the Big 5 Personality Inventory used by researchers to collect personality characteristic data in a study about the relationship between personality and vulnerability to being recruited into hate groups.
Characteristics of the study participants.
Here you are looking for age ranges of participants, from what location and/or setting they were recruited, percentages of male and female participants, whether or not the participants were compensated for their participation (examples of this would be course credit or monetary compensation).
The statistical analyses the authors used to analyze the data gathered. during their study.
You aren’t expected at the 200-level of study to know details about what the analyses do and why they were selected by your article’s author(s), just to be able to find them in the article and state that they were used in your summary. Examples of statistical analyses include: Descriptive statistics (means and standard deviations), t-tests, correlation coefficients, regression analysis, analysis of variance, and Chi Square. Analyses may be identified in the section of the article that describes the study method used, or in an analysis section or in the section where study results are described.
The results (also called the findings or outcomes) of the study.
Depending on how complicated the study is, results may occupy a smaller or a larger portion of the article. You don’t have to and shouldn’t (because it would be copying) repeat everything that the author(s) said in describing their results but do need to be detailed enough to cover all the key findings; for example, rather than repeating the exact significant difference number between to differing outcomes, you can say that one was significantly greater than the other.
The author’s or authors’ conclusions about their study and its results.
This is not a place to repeat a summary of how the research was done and what its findings were, a common mistake. Here you want to discuss author reflections on limitations of their study, what stands out about their results, they believe are possible meanings of the results, what directions for future research the results suggests, etc.
This assignment must be at least 3 pages long and APA formatted. A title page and reference page are required but do not count toward the paper length. APA format is required. There is no maximum length for this assignment because length can vary depending on article length and complexity. The summary must be focused, well articulated with an easy to follow organizational flow, of adequate detail to clearly demonstrate ability to unpack and summarize the key elements of the article. Summary submissions that skim article contents will receive a significant point deduction per article element not adequately covered . Examples of inadequate article element coverage would be saying, “The participants in the study covered in this article were of many different ages” when the article reported percentages of specific participant age ranges; saying that results were statistically analyzed rather than naming particular statistical analyses used; or failing to include in your summary conclusions the article authors reached about their study and its findings.