You will critically review and analyze three research articles published in peer reviewed academic journals related to your area of interest (Some examples: Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Policy Studies Journal, American Review of Public Administration, Administration and Society, State and Local Government Review, Evaluation Review). One of the three must use some form of regression analysis.
For each article:
- Explain the overall purpose and relevance of the article– what general issue is being investigated and why is it important?
- List the hypotheses that the authors are testing. For each research hypothesis, also provide the null hypothesis that it is being tested against.
- List the key dependent and independent variables (that is, the ones mentioned in the hypotheses) that the paper is concerned with, and explain how each variable is operationalized and measured.
- Explain where the data in the paper comes from, including whether it is population/administrative data or from a sample.
- Briefly describe the statistical methods used in the article to test the hypotheses, describe the results of these analyses (e.g. which variables are significant), and explain the implications of these results for the hypotheses the authors are testing.
- Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the paper from a methodological perspective. Did the authors control for all relevant variables? Were the data and methods appropriate for the question being asked? You should certainly mention any limitations that the authors themselves discuss in the article, but also any weaknesses or flaws that you think they might have missed.
The paper should be in the “10-15 pages” range – but the length is less important than the quality of your arguments and writing. You should keep direct quotes from the papers you are citing to a minimum. The goal of this assignment is to give you practice translating the technical academic jargon of peer-reviewed research into “normal English” that can be understood by a non-academic audience while still telling the “story” of the research accurately. You should submit .pdfs of all three articles you analyze along with the assignment answer itself.
