Exploring COVID-19 and Depression

Description

This is a concept paper. So instead of creating a full research study, collecting data, analyzing it, and writing the results,we will complete what is commonly called a “Concept Paper.” This isn’t an unnecessary short cut. All research projects will have some type of concept paper. This is a short summary explaining what the project is, why it is important, and how it will be carried out. The concept paper also reveals to the researcher where there are voids in thinking, gaps in planning, and holes in the process. Research can’t be done on the fly. It must be carefully planned. Researchers never know what the data will reveal to them, but they always must know how the will go about collecting, analyzing, and reporting the data. Typically, a concept paper contains… 1. …a clear description of the research topic, including what is already known about the topic. 2. …a primary, one-sentence research question. (Often, there will be additional secondary research questions as well.) The concept paper should connect the primary question to the existing literature. 3. …a demonstration and explanation of why it is important to answer the research question. This might include things like: (a) what good comes of the answer? (b) why is this project worth anyone’s time? (c) why should this topic be of interest to others in my field of study? 4. …a description of how you plan to answer the research question. This might include a. an outline of how the proposed project will be logically structured b. a description of the data that you plan to collect or use c. a description of how you will collect or gather these data d. a description of where you will gather or collect these data e. a description of how you will analyze these data, including statistical tools 5. …a statement of the limitations of this research, specifically things it cannot discover (and why). 6. …a summary of any ethical issues you expect to arise in the research process. 7. …a bibliography. Concept papers will typically use three to seven typed pages (around 750 to 2000 words), but may vary from that somewhat. In any case, the point of the paper is to provide a clear summary of the research project. It should enable a casual reader to understand what you are investigating, why it is important, and how the investigation will proceed. The concept paper will be divided into three chapters. The first chapter will include all the introductory material, the hypotheses statements, the research question(s), descriptions of the subjects, the importance of the study, and so on. The second chapter will be a review of the literature (lit review). The lit review does not need to be exhaustive, but it needs to demonstrate that you have looked at enough of the literature on your topic to know (in general) what is known, what is not known, and where there are any controversies on the subject. The third chapter will be a methods chapter, and will have descriptions of how the data will be collected, analyzed, and summarized. It will need to include some information about statistical tests and graphics that will be used, but you do not need to provide any results from these tests (since you aren’t collecting data). At the end, you’ll need to provide a bibliography. You will be citing sources formally in your lit review, as well as some in your introduction. You may also include some work that you won’t cite in the concept paper but know you will use once you collect and analyze the data. As with the lit review, the bibliography does not need to be exhaustive, but needs to be broad and you need to be sure nothing is written in the paper that is not properly cited (plagiarism can happen in concept papers just like real papers). Do not write an abstract. The abstract is usually the last thing written after completing a research project, and since you won’t be collecting or analyzing data, you won’t really be able to write a meaningful abstract. Here is perhaps the *biggest* problem students run headlong in to: A research paper is NOT A BOOK REPORT! You may have called writing a book report “research” in the past, but that is no longer true. Research involves collecting original data and analyzing it, not simply looking stuff up about your topic. You still will look stuff up and summarize it, but that is now only a small part of the research (your Chapter 2, in fact). Again, you don’t have time to collect much data in this 8-week course, but you do have time to set up the plan to do that, and that’s what you’ll be doing for this concept paper.