Purpose
The purpose of this guide is to provide you helpful hints on how to write the first assignment. As the first assignment is a draft document, these guidance document will help you to set up that first draft. We will subsequently add surveys/measurement issues, and data analysis (the outcome of the second block) and polish this first draft further to craft a real document as a proposal - the outcome of the third block. Take as much as you need from this document. You can also ask questions on this document directly by selecting the speech balloon that should show up on the right hand side margin.
Steps of writing the first assignment
Step 1. Start with some rough ideas that you want to investigate. This idea can be anything related to health, you will narrow down the idea later using the process and steps that follow.
Step 2. Search databases such as Google Scholar and the UC library databases, Ovid, and others to narrow down the scope of the topic. Pick up one or more (not more than four or five) reviews if you can. If you cannot find reviews, pick up some primary studies and fill in the spreadsheet I showed you in the workshop. Fill in the argument ID, the citations, synopsis, main conclusion, explicit and implicit premises, evidence in support of premises, your own notes about the paper, and favourite quotes. You see that some of these points (quotes, etc) are specific to the article, and premises and conclusions are specific to the argument; usually you will find more than one argument per article or source.
Step 3. At this stage, you will see the idea starts consolidating a little more. Follow the trail and write it down.
Step 4. Continue in this way till you find as many arguments as you think you have identified
Step 5. Do these ideas show you a pattern that you can identify? Write that generalisable idea and use a language that uses "probability" to state it.
Step 6. From the generalisable idea and all other premises that you filled in for arguments, etc, start putting together a theory that explains the phenomena. This theory will guide development of your hypotheses.
Step 7. Now develop some predictions and use these predictions (narrow down or make the predictions as precise as possible) and use these as your hypotheses that you will test.
Step 8. Think of ways in which you can obtain data from people to test the hypotheses (will it be objective measurement, will it be a survey? What will it be?) At this stage, ideas of sample size will come into consideration. Use OpenEpi website to estimate the sample size. If that does not work, do not worry, we will revisit this in the second block.
Once you have fleshed out the eight steps, now work back up and write a text on the proposal using the following headings:
- An appropriate title
- A background that will contain definition and discussions on the exposure or intervention, the outcome,
- Background that will identify what is known about the problem
- what is not known or where are gaps in the knowledge that you will fill in
- What is new for your study
- Your theory
- Your hypotheses
- Your plan of data collection
- A list of references
Tables, and figures will be included wherever you want them to and refer in the text.
An illustration of the steps
These steps are only for illustration, a real world project would be more detailed.
I am interested to find out or do a research on finding out if happy people live healthier lives.
Step 1. Ask a question or think of an idea
My question: "Do happy people lead healthier lives?" Why do we need to know, what do we know, what do we not know, and how would we find out?
Why do we need to know: if we know that happy people live healthy lives, we can assume that there may be a causal linkage, and if there is one, then it will be possible to design happiness interventions to enable people lead healthy lives. This will contribute to national goals and international aims of enabling people live healthier.
Step 2: Conduct a search (you will need computer and access to the Internet and one or more search engines for this)
Search of the databases and do a citation tracking.
We will here only use Google Scholar for searching but other databases such as Medline/Pubmed and University of Canterbury's Library based searches and Ovid, etc are also other sources. We will do forward and backward citation tracking as follows.
Google scholar:
Searching intitle:"happiness" intitle:"health" , we found over 60 articles published since 2014, and a citation with five links for articles published since this publication was an article by Chopik et.al (2017).
Chopik, W. J., & O'brien, E. (2017). Happy you, healthy me? Having a happy partner is independently associated with better health in oneself. Health Psychology, 36(1), 21.
This article was published in 2016-2017 and investigated whether partner happiness was associated with healthy life and looked interesting \cite{chopik2017happy}. We downloaded this article and read the article.
Firstly, while searching for this article, we found an interesting article that cited this article and was published in 2017, the article is as follows \cite{lwi2018genuine}:
Lwi, S. J., Casey, J. J., Verstaen, A., Connelly, D. E., Merrilees, J., Levenson, R. W., & Knight, B. G. (2018). Genuine Smiles by Patients During Marital Interactions are Associated with Better Caregiver Mental Health. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B.
This is an example of forward citation tracking.
Then, while reading the Chopik article, we found two other articles:
Chida, Y., & Steptoe, A. (2008). Positive psychological well-being and mortality: A quantitative review of prospective observational studies. Psychosomatic Medicine, 70, 741–756.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0b013e31818105ba
Diener, E., & Chan, M. Y. (2011). Happy people live longer: Subjective well-being contributes to health and longevity. Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, 3, 1–43.
This is an example of backward citation tracking.
These four articles formed the basis on which we will do the next steps. In real life, you will work till you find that you have saturated the articles and authors list and you will not find more articles to read and books to cover and then you will stop.
Before we move to step 3, we will read these four articles and abstract arguments and ideas in the following tables.
Step 3. Deconstruct and reconstruct arguments and conclusions in each article you read
You can do these things in different ways. The way I do is to start reading an article, and then summarise the article using the following headings:
Title of the article:
Diener, E., & Chan, M. Y. (2011). Happy people live longer: Subjective well‐being contributes to health and longevity. Applied Psychology: Health and Well‐Being, 3(1), 1-43.
Synopsis of the article
Main Argument or Final Conclusion of the article
Supporting Reasons
Cited Evidence to support the reasons
My own critique of the article
Questions to go forward
Favourite Quotes
You can organise these in different ways. I usually use a spreadsheet like a google spreadsheet to enter these as headings and add a citation ID to go with it. I also use another sheet to work as a standard form because main argument (or different conclusions, main conclusion, reasons are best captured in a standard form), and then fill in the rest of the entries. Do not do so while you read the article (do not parallel read the article and take notes: rather, read the article first, keep an eye out to capture the main argument (usually these are signposted in the title or the abstract), and look for his main supporting reasoning and evidence in support of them. Then, after you have read the article at least once, jot down the list of conclusions, arguments, etc. Remember that there would be one final conclusion per argument and as many subconclusions, explicit premises, etc. You will next supply the implicit premises. As you read mark the favourite quotes and later capture them as you go back. But the first reading must be free of anything else. NO parallel note taking.
Title of the article should be obvious.
Synopsis of the article is essentially your own worded summary of the article. this can be as long or as short as you want it to be. There is usually only
ONE main argument or final conclusion and everything else feeds into that main argument, so capture this.
Cited evidence will feed into the main argument and see which ones you can remember or think as most supportive.
Your critique will be to identify and list the implicit assumptions and fact checking whether these make sense or whether you will dispute or argue. Also, here you will list the facts you get from the article and see if you see any pattern that emerges.
Questions to go forward will be based on your reading of the set of explicit reasonings, implicit reasonings, facts, conclusions, arguments, and see the overall pattern. Based on the pattern, you will then ask the question, "How do I explain this?" Your explanation will lead to theories and associated hypotheses that you'd like to test. Favourite quotes are those that you marked when you first read the article. Works best if you use something like a PDF reader embedded in a reference manager such as Mendeley, otherwise use any highlight function you can in your PDF reader.
Hypothe.sis is a good service where you can mark quotes and put your own impressions.
I am just going to run these steps and show you the output of my Google spreadsheet where I capture all of these for one article " Diener, E., & Chan, M. Y. (2011). Happy people live longer: Subjective well‐being contributes to health and longevity. Applied Psychology: Health and Well‐Being, 3(1), 1-43". \cite{diener2011happy}
You can read the article on your own and see what conclusions you come up with. I just jotted down a few points but this will provide you with some idea as to what we are getting at: