Empirical Articles

Article Helper: Empirical Articles

Author: ______Title: ______

Journal: ______Vol: _____ Iss: ______Yr: ______Pgs: ______

Research Question: What is the author’s big theme? Into what scholarly line of inquiry or debate does this article fit?

Dependent Variable: (the thing being explained) Key Indep. Variable(s): (the explainers)

Literature Review: Is this article in reaction to any specific weakness in the existing research? Does it respond in particular to any specific article(s) or author(s)?

Theory: What is the author’s story line? How or why, through what means or mechanisms, are the main variables related?

Hypotheses: What specific predictions does the author make about relationships or patterns that should emerge among the variables in the data? These should normally look like “↑ X  ↑ Y” .

Tests and Results: For quantitative work, I suggest you make a table with the variable name, how it’s measured, its predicted sign (i.e., the relationship the author’s hypothesis posits between the specific explanatory variable and the dependent variable), and then a final column with the actual sign reported in the results and some indication of statistical significance. You might also include here notes on research design, such as the unit of analysis, case selection, data sets/sources used, type of model tested, etc., depending on your own methodological comfort level. For qualitative work, this section might include brief notes about the case(s) examined and how the variables of interest appear, and how that relates to the author’s predicted relationships. Tabular form may be appropriate, but you should have textual notes on the data presented for future reference.

Conclusions and Observations: Do the author’s findings support the posited theory? Do the findings counter any major conclusions in the existing literature? Are there any parts of the article you don’t believe, don’t trust, or dispute? Are there further questions or additional research ideas that you see in this work, perhaps in relations to other topics or lines of inquiry? Are there other variables you think should have been included, or concerns about variable measurement?