Part 1: each student annotates one quantitative article relevant to the team’s topic
• Each team member should do a literature search on your topic using Sociological Collection (to be demonstrated in class).
• Each team member should find, read, and understand (at least the “big picture” of) one quantitative article (i.e., that uses
numbers / statistics to analyze some aspect of the topic) that is a “good fit” for your topic
o Each member should find a different article, so if there are 5 teammates, there will be 5 articles.
o Articles must be “full-text”, meaning you can read the entire document via the Hofstra library (Access to the
abstract alone is not enough)
• Each teammate, for the one article they have chosen, will write an “annotation” in the following format:
I. Write the full, proper reference for the article (APA format), as if it were appearing in a Works Cited Page.
II. Below the reference, write your full name
III. Below that, provide a very brief, 2-3 sentence, summary of that article’s main finding (“the big picture”; do not get
bogged down in statistics. Focus on “concepts”)
▪ This must be your own words—you may NOT copy and paste text from the article.
▪ Imagine you are having a conversation, and you must describe the article in a few sentences to a friend.
IV. Identify a Dependent Variable and briefly describe its “typology”
• What is the DV and what categories does it have
V. State the relationship (correlation) between the DV and an Independent Variable.
VI. Briefly describe the causal reasoning (“understanding”). Why does the author believe the above correlation holds?
VII. List and briefly describe one important control variable the author uses to support the above causal explanation.
(non-spuriousness; rival explanation)
**** if a correlation is non-spurious, it means that other rival explanations have been ruled out, so it’s just asking you what important variable was controlled for during the study that could have altered the study’s results