WOMEN STUDIES 1
Women Diversity and Women Liberation
Leslie Williams
Liberty University
James Blunk
INDS 400
September 6, 2020
Topic
Women’s diversity and fight for equality in the 21st century differ from the liberation of women in the 20th century.
Hypothesis
The diversification and fight for equality in the 21st century cannot compare to the 20th. In the past century men aged 25-54 were literate with post-secondary education were but today women are more educated than men. Most women go to school today, unlike the 20th century.
Research Questions
Did women liberation in the 20th century differ from women’s equality and diversification in the 21st century?
Disciplines
The disciplines incorporated in this proposal include sociology and gender studies.
Justification
The topic above is in relation to issues that women have faced from the 20th century including lack of proper education. Gender studies is an interdisciplinary area that analyses gender identity and representation. This field is the best for the topic above because it encompasses all issues that revolve around gender that are both male and female issues around the globe and at all times. It also encompasses various studies that relate to masculinity and femininity in the society and the representation of the different sexes in such fields for instance education and film (Laurie & Hickey-Moody, 2015). Gender studies are not biased and do not take sides on either gender but discuss all of them as one. Sociology on the other is a field under social sciences that aims at studying the functioning, structure, and development of human society. This branch of studies is beneficial to the above topic as it will help understand the relations, patterns, and interactions that exist in human societies pertaining to culture and how they relate or conflict with the position that women have in society today.
Methodology and Rationale Instructions
Prompt: In 150-400 words describe a hypothetical methodology for studying your research topic. In the same document, in 250-400 words, create a rationale justifying studying your topic to your audience.
Requirements:
1. Do not use first or second person in the rationale, but you may use first person in the methodology.
2. In addition to a specific explanation of how you will test your research question, your methodology should explain how you will analyze the data and how you would recognize a significant result.
3. In your rationale, the question you are answering is this: Why is your research proposal a good way to study this problem, and why should we fund this research? Pretend you are convincing a board of academics in this field that your research proposal is worth financial support.
4. Your grammar, spelling, and punctuation should be flawless. Visit the Liberty University writing centers if you want extra help: https://www.liberty.edu/academics/casas/academicsuccess/index.cfm?PID=38382
5. Use APA formatting; no abstract or title page is required but do include a reference page if you use sources.
Additional Suggestions for Methodology:
1. Look up methodologies in the journal articles you have been researching and use those as models and guides.
2. Everyone’s methodology will look a little bit different. Your methodology may include an experiment with two groups getting different treatments, one group that gets tested before and after a treatment, or a large group of people filling out a survey. Or you may be suggesting a research proposal that involves reading literature and analyzing it.
3. Remember that simply reading textbooks or other journal articles is just secondary research. A good methodology does primary research and finds new information rather than just compiling old information, so do not include a methodology that proposes reading articles.
4. Whatever you do, make sure that your results cannot be brought into question. For instance, if you wanted to test the effects of a drug on humans and did not clarify what humans, I might wonder if your results would be skewed because more or fewer men or women could be in different experimental groups than in the others. Be specific about your demographics or aspects of your methodology.
5. Or if you were doing a study of postmodern literature but did not say when the postmodern era began, you would get very different results based on your cutoff date.
6. You can be creative with your methodology, but you must also be skeptical. Would you have faith in your own methods to return a reliable result?
7. It is usually a good idea to include at the end of your methodology what a significant result would look like: if your hypothesis is very correct or very incorrect, how will the researcher be able to confirm that?
8. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to get started:
A. What would I need to find to suggest that my hypothesis is correct?
B. How can I eliminate variables that might confuse my results? (i.e. If studying effects of sunlight on positivity in a work environment, make sure you are not also adding free food or opportunities to walk around.)
C. If you’re studying humans, which ones, and why does it matter? How old are they? What ethnicity? What religion? What income level? What education level? Not all of these will matter for every study (education level would be more important than religion in studying effects of education on earning potential), but identify the ones that do.
D. If you’re doing textual analysis, what texts do you plan to analyze? And what will you be looking for when you read them?
Additional Suggestions for Rationales:
1. Usually the introduction (or actual rationales) of a journal article share some similarities with a rationale—they both typically mention the problem being studied and why it’s important to learn about it. Use the journal articles you’ve researched so far as models and guides for developing your rationale.
2. Your rationale will likely be 1-3 paragraphs.
3. You can begin your first paragraph with a mini thesis statement that sounds something like “Research Topic X is important to study because a significant finding will have such-and-such an effect(s).” Use your own words, but those key elements (research topic, value judgment, effect(s) that is important to your audience, etc.) should appear in your justification.
4. The rest of your rationale can expand on these effects as you connect those to your audience and show the importance of what you are proposing studying.
5. The last sentence of your rationale should summarize your main idea and emphasize the importance again.
6. Remember to speak in terms of what your academic audience (the people you want to convince) want. Don’t make it obvious you’re talking to someone in particular (i.e. “Because my audience loves children, I want to study children.”), but consistently speak in terms of the benefits others will receive from what you find. These do not need to be big benefits either—research is often a series of small steps towards big conclusions.
Literature Review Instructions Prompt: In 1,000-1,200 words and using at least five scholarly, relevant, and appropriate sources, create a literature review of the scholarship around the topic of your research proposal. Requirements:
1. A literature review requires two things: it summarizes the context of other scholar’s work related to your topic, and it mentions the research gap that you propose to fill. Both of these are important to mention and to emphasize.
2. You must use third person 3. Your grammar, spelling, and punctuation should be flawless. Visit the Liberty University
writing centers if you want extra help: https://www.liberty.edu/academics/casas/academicsuccess/index.cfm?PID=38382
4. APA formatting including a title page but not an abstract 5. Your title must include your areas of study. 6. In the context of this assignment, it is important to remember that you are summarizing
the most current and relevant research to your topic. This means that even many books will not be considered scholarly sources. A self-help book, a book published for a general audience, or a textbook will usually not be appropriate as a scholarly source for this assignment (though they may mention sources that are more trustworthy). Generally, journal articles, peer-reviewed books, and books published by university presses (for the purpose of scholarship) are good sources to begin with.
Additional Suggestions:
1. It will be VERY tempting to argue for your point. If you are researching tent-making missionary success in Peru, it will be VERY tempting to make the literature review an argument for why more missionaries need to go to Peru as tent-makers. Resist the temptation. Instead, identify contexts of your research and report on those without bias. In this case, you could find out what recent scholars have said about recent developments in Peru regarding missions, tent-making ministries, and missionary experiences in South America. Report on these to set a framework for the research you are proposing and mention the “gap” in scholarship that your research might fill—what part of the conversation is missing that you hope to provide? Only report on the state of scholarship regarding the context of your question and mention the research gap. That is what a literature review does.
2. An easy way to organize a literature review might look like this: A. Have an introduction paragraph introducing scholarship and the research gap B. Have separate body paragraphs summarizing and discussing the relevancy of one
source each (though feel free to mention the sources in each other’s paragraphs or to not dedicate a paragraph to each source if not needed)
C. Have a conclusion paragraph that summarizes the research and emphasizes the research gap
3. At the end of your introduction paragraph, you should include a non-argumentative thesis statement that summarizes the general idea of what you found in your research, mentioning scholarship and the research gap.
4. Be sure to include introduction and conclusion paragraphs. Your body paragraphs should be unified and have strong controlling and concluding sentences.
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