MA Proposal Workshop: Session 1

Welcome to the MA Proposal Workshop, session 1. The goal of this micro-workshop series, a subunit of the computational social science workshop for first-year MACSS students, is to help develop an intuition for cutting edge social science research and orient them to the thinking and expectations for the MA thesis requirement in the second year of study.

One of the goals of that thesis will be to produce a new original piece of research that emulates the high-quality research that can be found in flagship social science journals. Your work should extend cutting edge research, both theoretically and methodologically, expanding the knowledge in your social science subfield.

A good way to begin thinking about a thesis topic, among other approaches, could be to look for a recent interesting research article in a top journal. This raises the first assignment.

Assignment 1

Thinking about your social science field of interest, review recent journal articles from a flagship journal in your field, for example, the American Sociological Review, American Economic Review, American Political Science Review, or Psychological Review. In examining the article you select, pay particular attention to the theoretical framing, data and methods, and discussion.

In your response, briefly identify the research questions in the selected article as well as the data and method used. Then, keeping your evaluation of the article in mind, write a proposal of at least one paragraph in length that proposes an additional research question that you would be interested in researching that theoretically extends the findings of the selected article. For your extension project, what data and methods would you utilize?

When writing the proposal section, offer some theoretical justification for your proposed topic. Ideally, the topic you suggest should be one, that if properly executed could be published. In other words, you should suggest a substantial extension project, not simply a trivial addition, such as adding covariates to the model or evaluating the original research questions using expanding or different data.

Include an additional section of works cited. You should follow an accepted and consistent in-text citations and bibliography style such as ASA, APA, or Chicago. At a minimum, you should cite the article you selected and provide appropriate in-text citation and quotation throughout your response. If you cite other works, also include those in the references.

Requirements

• Due: Thursday, March 14th 10:59 am CDT
• Submission Format: Submit your response as a new, original Github issue on this repository. For the title of your Github issue, use the following format: "Extension: Author (YEAR)". For example: "Extension: Rivera and Tilcsik (2016)" I have provided an example issue as a guide.
• Length: 500-750 words, not including the references
• Original: You must work alone on this assignment, picking an original article and proposed extension. If someone has already selected your intended article, then pick another one to summarize and extend. Realizing this will put you at odds if you pick an article and write a response, my recommendation is as follows. Find an article you want to extend. Then check the Github issues to ensure nobody has already chosen this article. If true, then claim your intended article by starting a new issue with the title formatted as follows: "Extension: Author (YEAR)." In this way, nobody else will be allowed to use this article and you may provide a quality response at your leisure, submitting by the deadline. Responses that use the same article as another student will not be counted as completing this assignment. This may seem like a strict requirement, but you will ultimately need your own independent thesis project, and similarly, you must have an original article and proposal.