methods paragraph for introduction

The introduction also should include a paragraph about methods, which should describe how the project collected and analyzed data, and your part in that.

Here's an example,

This research was conducted by students in three of Timothy Kubal's sociology classes during the fall 2014 semester.  I was in the Popular Culture class.  We began conducting practice interviews during the first week of classes, and by the third week had conducted several practice interviews and completed a test on the American Sociological Association's Code of Ethics.  We were then given the interview guide, which contained about 50 questions.  All the questions were closed-ended questions except open ended questions on music, homelessness, and inequality.  We practiced on a classmate, and made suggestions regarding question wording.  The survey was then finalized and we began interviewing over the next three weeks.  Each of us chose our informants based on convenience sampling (we interviewed whoever we wanted), and were told to interview family and friends, and to find a diverse group of interviewees based on race, class, gender, and education.  I enjoyed doing the interviews and noticed my interviewing skills improve as I progressed.  We all used the icati recording system which allowed the use of the phone as a recording device, and emailed us a link to the recording, which we pasted into the last question of the survey, thus connecting the recordings to the surveys.  Most interviews were conducted in a face to face fashion, although some were recorded using the icati system to make a 3-way call with the interviewee.  Interviews lasted between 15 minutes and 1 hour.  Most interviews were about 25 minutes.  I personally conducted 5 interviews, and all my interviews were over 30 minutes.  All of my interviews were face to face interviews.   After conducting over 700 interviews total, students then transcribed their own interviews.  I transcribed all five of my interviews.  I did not like transcribing as much as other parts of the research process.  The professor then cleaned the data and gave us the data in computer analysis programs SPSS and Nvivo.  Then we began the analysis; first I  produced a quantitative paper, using the SPSS program to produce five chi-squared tables.  Then I produced a qualitative paper using Nvivo to analyze patterns in the quotes related to my tables. And then the qualitative and quantitative papers were combined into the current draft; the following analysis is the product of these efforts.

introduction and conclusion

A good introduction asks a question that is answered throughout the paper and answered at the end.

For example, if I did my paper on

gender x rap

race x rap

political party x rap

marital status x rap

age x rap

Then, I might have a question in the introduction like this,

 How does gender, race, political party, marital status and age shape people's opinions and talk about rap music?

And in the conclusion I would incorporate my key findings from both qualitative and quantitative portions of the paper.

So I would want to restate the question and provide my answer; something like this,

This paper sought to understand how gender, race, political party, marital status and age shaped people's opinions and speech about rap music.  Through analysis of quantitative and qualitative data I found that African Americans and Hispanics like rap more than Whites, because they grew up with it, and had friends and family that listened to rap while they were growing up, while Whites were less likely to connect rap to their history, family, or friends.  I found that women do not appreciate rap music as much as men because they find the lyrics sexist. I found that republicans dislike the violent lyrics and thus are less likely to enjoy rap compared to democrats and independents.  I found that married people are less likely than unmarried people to enjoy rap; married folks complain they can't understand the lyrics.  Lastly, I found that young people like rap more than older people, because young people tend to ignore the lyrics and enjoy the beats.

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I also have another suggestion --I did not request the following so it is not a required part of the paper, but another thing a good conclusion does is talk about limitations and future research.  Limitations are things that could impact the quality of the findings, such as a biased sample.  Future research are things you learned from this research that should be studied in similar research in the future.

Here's an example:

There were limitations to this research. The research was not conducted by professional researchers; it was conducted by students, many of whom were practicing this research for the first time. Because we used a convenience sample of each student's family and friends, we definitely did not have a random sample, and that means we should not generalize our findings to other people, time or places.  These findings can still prove useful as comparisons to future research.  This project has uncovered some interesting questions that might be answered in the future.  Regarding rap, future researchers should probe further if young people truly ignore the lyrics or if they just say they ignore the lyrics to defend any stigma of listening to music that is disliked by so many other people.  Also, future research should explore further how democrats -- who typically espouse attitudes of egalitarianism -- can align their political views with rap lyrics.  It would be interesting to probe democrats further about reconciling rap with their political beliefs. In a more general sense, this project has uncovered other questions, such as why social class was not only not significantly related to rap music, but also did not show a significant relationship with any of the twenty one questions we asked about music preferences. Why are so many demographic characteristics related to music, but social class is never one of them?  Similarly, future research should explore why race was significant with almost every question about music -- it was the variable that had a significant relationship with the most questions on music -- 18 of the 21 questions on music showed a statistically significant relationship with race.

fyi reusing quotes

Once a quote has been used, it cannot be reused again. Its OK to use one part of the quote in one part of the paper and another part of the quote in another part of the paper, but the exact same words cannot be used more than once.