SOC 491: SENIOR CAPSTONE

Professor: Julie Fennell

Course Meeting Times: Online

Office Hours: By appointment (zoom)

The Senior Capstone Seminar is designed to permit students to integrate elements of previous course-work into a step-by-step development and completion of a senior research project. Projects will be highly individualized, and tailored to the specific goals and interests of students.

Course Goals

This seminar facilitates students’ application of theoretical ideas as well as research designs to a specific research project each student chooses. To this end, the course is designed to enable you to:

Integrate sociological knowledge into the empirical study of a specific topic

Conduct a research project that suits your career aspirations and research interests.

Use the ASA style of referencing correctly

Provide structure for the creation and development of individualized projects

Incorporate comments by other readers into successive drafts of written material

Provide useful feedback for other people’s written work and thinking

Formally present your project at the end of the semester

For this class, I will work with each of you to tailor the class to your individual plans and preferences. Among your available options:

You may design a research project, including a detailed literature review (minimum 10 sources) and methods section.

You may use extant data, either data that are publicly available or that you may obtain from me or Prof. Farley, or build on data that were collected for previous classes (such as my Queer sociology class, or my Social Problems class), and focus on data analysis (you will still need a short literature review and methods section).

Build on a previous large project (typically an honors project) to create/expand a full research project.

You may build from a previous research paper that you wrote for another class to extend it and conduct actual research from it.

I am open to other suggestions.

UNIVERSITY AND SOCIOLOGY LEARNING OBJECTIVES

University learning outcomes

Tasks done

Assessed by

1. Language & Communication

1.2 Demonstrate competence in academic writing.

1.4 Present content coherently.

1.5 Express ideas and information effectively in a variety of formats.

class presentations,

presentation to Sociology faculty,

proposal

rubrics

2. Critical Thinking

2.1 Select relevant sources of information.

2.2 Bring together ideas to arrive at reasonable conclusions

Review of the literature section

rubric

4. Knowledge & Inquiry

4.1 Demonstrate competence in the fundamental… methods in this major field.

Methodology section

rubric

Sociology/Criminology Learning Outcome 3: Develop sociological research questions and literature reviews

3a. Develop independent sociological research questions.

Introduction and Review of the Literature

rubric

3b. Find relevant sociological literature, summarize that work, and analyze it.

Review of the Literature Section

rubric

Sociology/Criminology Learning Outcome 4: Explain and apply different sociological research methods.

Methodology section

rubric

4d. Determine which method is most appropriate for answering a research question.

Methodology section

Rubric,

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