This assignment will give you the opportunity to put together everything we have discussed in evaluating a research article from the published literature.
Assume you are part of a reading group in a professional setting, identifying and sharing published literature with a group of colleagues. Working individually, you should choose one of these two papers:
Lim, S. (2009), How and why do
college students use Wikipedia?. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,
60: 2189–2202. doi:
10.1002/asi.21142 (link is to DOI PDF; may require proxy authentication)
Takahashi Y, Uchida C, Miyaki K, Sakai M, Shimbo T,
Nakayama T, Potential Benefits and
Harms of a Peer Support Social Network Service on the Internet for People With
Depressive Tendencies: Qualitative Content Analysis and Social Network Analysis,
J Med Internet Res 2009;11(3):e29
URL: http://www.jmir.org/2009/3/e29/
doi:
10.2196/jmir.1142
and evaluate the paper you choose for this group. As appropriate, you would want to look at the problem in question and the problem statement, research questions, hypotheses, theoretical background, literature review, and paradigm or approach. In particular, you should focus on method, and concepts we’ve discussed such as conceptualization and operationalization, validity, reliability, trustworthiness, credibility, population or community, sampling, instruments or processes for data collection, data analysis, and of course the results and their interpretations and conclusions the author(s) draw.
Then, in a narrative of no more than 1500 words, you should lay out your evaluation, both on the details of the work and your overall evaluation, describing what you thought was done well and not, whether you trust the findings, supporting and defending your opinions throughout. In your final paragraph, you should tell your colleagues your overall opinion of the work and its results.
Your work will be evaluated on your demonstrated understanding of the research concepts involved, insight and thoroughness of your work and the overall quality of your presentation.
The assignment is due at noon on March 15 and may be submitted via Catalyst.