Milestone One Guidelines

Milestone One Guidelines

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Note that you are required to use Southern New Hampshire University students as research participants by using the PSY 510/520 Lounge in SNHUConnect (link is located in the left-hand navigation menu). You are strictly prohibited from using individuals outside of Southern New Hampshire University as research participants.

In PSY 520, you will be collecting and analyzing data in an attempt to answer your research question. Before you do this, however, it is important that you have your research proposal (i.e., your PSY 510 paper) in a very strong shape. Your research proposal will form the building block for the full research paper that you will submit in this course.

As you revise your PSY 510 paper, be sure to take into account the feedback from your instructor from PSY 510. In addition, use the list below as a guide for how to revise your paper into an exemplary research proposal. As you revise your paper, be sure to think about how you will go from a proposal to an actual research project as you will be using your research proposal from PSY 510 to help complete your final project for this course, a research manuscript.

To help see the flow of the PSY 510 and PSY 520 projects, you can review this document.

Paper Element

Characteristics of an Exemplary Paper

 The beginning of the paper clearly explains the general purpose of the research, and it relates the research to a real-world issue.

 This section should be interesting to read and entice the reader.

Problem Statement

 This section should review relevant research on the topic.

 The literature needs to be an integrated discussion of research on the topic, not a one-by-one summary of all the articles you found.

 The literature should build towards your research question and hypothesis. In other words, research that is most relevant to your research question and hypothesis should be discussed. Research only tangentially related to your research question should not be included.

Literature Review

 This should be clearly stated at the end of your literature review.

 Because the problem statement introduced the general research question and the literature review builds toward the research

question, when you state your specific research question it should not surprise the reader.

Research Question

Hypothesis

 Your hypothesis should be clearly stated.

 It should be supported by your literature review, so it should not be a surprise to the reader. In other words, your hypothesis is not just a guess of what you will find; it is an educated guess supported by research.

 Your proposed participants, materials, and procedures should be clearly described.

 Keep in mind that you will rewrite this section in Milestone Four once your data collection is complete.

Methods

Data Analysis Plan

 This section will not be included in your final paper, since you will ultimately explain what you actually did in your Results section.

Anticipated Results

 This section will ultimately be rewritten in Milestone Four once you have analyzed your data.

Overall

 Be sure to follow APA style. Use your style manual!

 The entire paper should flow. Even though it is broken into

sections, each section should flow into the next and the paper

should read as one coherent, integrated paper.

 Be sure to proofread carefully. It is very unlikely that your

instructor corrected every typo and grammatical mistake. One of the best techniques is to read the paper out loud so as to catch awkward phrasing.

Guidelines for Submission: Submit a copy of your PSY 510 research proposal reflecting any new edits to be graded pass/fail.