CRM/SOCL 337
TERM PAPER
GUIDELINES
PURPOSE: the purpose of this 7-page term paper assignment (plus front cover and references) is for you to expand your knowledge on deviance, to learn how to make connections between what you have learned in class with the topics you are passionate about it, and, most important, to engage in the preliminary steps of social research such as identifying a research topic and to critically review the academic literature on it.
STEPS IN YOUR RESEARCH PROCESS: the following two steps are key to a successful anthology, namely selecting a topic and reviewing the literature on it.
1 Select a Topic: for this assignment, you need to first, identify a topic of interest to you. You will have considerable freedom in choosing your topic, but we ask you to choose a type of deviant behavior or a deviant group that you would like to do research on. Choose a topic that you are fascinated with and that in, some way or another, it relates to your career plans.
2 Review of the Literature: even though you are given much flexibility in choosing your topic, we ask that you follow very specific guidelines when it comes to how your research and final product should look like. The main idea is that you read what has been published on this topic and summarize what you have learned from it. You may accomplish this task by identifying a set of academic articles (3 academic articles) on a topic and summarize each one of these articles. Academic articles include peer reviewed journal articles or book chapters . Number of pages: 7 pages average.
3 YOUR FINAL PRODUCT: specifically, your assignment should include the following elements or components:
a) A book cover that you could design yourself using your own art or doing a collage or borrowing images from the Internet.
b) An introduction that explains the topic you chose, how it is related and/or distinct from the given course content, and the types of sources you chose to examine.
c) A thoughtful summary of each source. Each summary should answer the following questions:
o What are the author’s main points, conclusions, or findings?
o What evidence does the author use to support those conclusions or findings?
o What are the limitations of the source? (E.g., identify components of the issue or related questions the author did not address/answer)
d) A conclusion in which explain what these articles tell us about the topic you chose. How these articles relate to each other? Where do they disagree? And how these sources relate to course content?
4. GRADING: you will receive a letter grade for this project. The grading scale is the same as the one we are using for all your other assignments. Your grade will depend on how well you do on each of the four components of the final product. DUE DATE: on or before Friday, April 14th.