Reference no: EM133732452

Assignment: Marijuana Dependence & Nervousness Introduction & Method Section Draft

Treat your draft of the introduction and method section as if you were writing this for your final paper. Your spelling, grammar, citations, etc., all count.

Introduction

The introduction of your paper will be about 1.5 to 2 pages double-spaced and should include the following four components:

I. Research Problem: Here you need to briefly talk about why your topic is important to study. Why should the reader care about a study on ______? What information could be gained from doing a study on this? You may want to use information concerning prevalence rates or costs associated with your topic from peer-reviewed articles or from sources like the Office of Applied Statistics (SAMSHA), NIMH (also has costs), or the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly (CDC).

II. Literature Review: After setting up your research problem, you should review research findings suggesting a link between your first variable and second variable. These were on your paper topic assignment. What did these studies find? These findings are then support for your hypothesis (prediction).

III. Limitations of Prior Research: In addition to discussing what is known from previous studies, you should address how the prior research that you discuss was limited. E.g., Did they use small, nonrepresentative samples? What is your study doing that's improving upon that past research? However, you need to be careful here. Don't talk about limitations of those studies if they are the same limitations of YOUR study. For example, the NSDUH is based on self-reports, so you wouldn't want to state that as a limitation of prior research since it's also a limitation of your study.

IV. Present Study: You'll end your introduction with what you're proposing to do for your study and what your directional hypothesis is. It should look something like this:

The present study examined the relationship between heavy drinking behavior and psychological distress based on data from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health (2016). Based on prior research it was hypothesized that adults with high levels of psychological distress will be more likely to drink heavily in the past month compared to adults with low levels of psychological distress.

Method

The method section of a paper describes how the researcher did the study. It's described in such a way that someone could replicate the study if they wanted to. Your Method section is describing how the NSDUH study was done since that's the data you're using. You need to read the beginning of the codebook (i.e., Overview of NSDUH, Survey Methodology) to get this information. Don't forget to paraphrase! It should be about 1 page double-spaced, with the following sections:

I. Sample: 1 paragraph. Who participated in the NSDUH study? Were there eligibility criteria? Was the sample a probability sample or a non-probability sample? Where did they get their participants from? Are you only using a certain subset of the sample (e.g., males only, adolescents only)?

II. Procedures: 1 paragraph. This is the story about what happened to the participants during the study. How were the data collected? Where did the interview take place? Who interviewed them?Were they paid for their participation?

III. Measures: 1 paragraph for each variable you chose. For each of your 2 variables, you need to state what questions participants were asked and how they could be answered. Also, if you're using a diagnosis variable you need to describe how that variable was created (look in the appendices of the codebook for this information).