Questions to Answer
Week 7: Quantitative Article Critique
| Assignment Guidelines 1. Please keep the 11 questions below in your document preceding your answer (i.e., don’t delete the question after you answer it or prepare the paper in a narrative format without the questions embedded). 2. You don’t need to cite the authors in each of your responses, it’s clear what article you are referring to. 3. However, any time you include a short quote from the article in your response (which should be done sparingly), please do provide the page number from the article. 4. Ensure you appropriately paraphrase the material from the article in your response to each question (use no more than 3-4 of the authors’ words in a row when summarizing information from the article). 5. All discussions of the study that follow should be in past tense as the study has already happened (Note the use of was and were above rather than is and are in the sample text in #1 below). 6. If you didn’t cite any other sources in your critique, besides the article you critiqued, you can delete the word References at the bottom of this page as you won’t need a reference list. |
Critiqued by:
Date:
Source reference (provide the complete citation of the article here, using correct APA format, which you are critiquing):
Introduce the study by providing a brief summary of the focus and the research question(s) or purpose for the study. (“The focus of this study was… There were ___ research questions: …. No research questions were stated, but the authors indicated the purpose of the study was….”)
Write a bullet point outline (paraphrased) of the main themes or points the authors discussed in their literature review. (e.g., “Emotional intimacy has been shown to influence relationship satisfaction; Self-disclosure is important for couple’s emotional intimacy…”)
What purpose does a review of the literature serve for a quantitative research study (Remember this question is not about this study, it’s about quantitative research studies in general)?
Given the purpose of a literature review for quantitative research you described above, did the authors do a good job with this? Why or why not?
Describe the methods used in this study. Include which quantitative approach was used (e.g., cross-sectional survey, longitudinal survey, quasi-experimental, experimental), what sampling strategy was used, who the participants were [number, age, gender, race/ethnicity], and how the author(s) operationalized their variables of interest (In other words, what measures did they use to assess which variables [“The researchers used the Beck Depression Inventory-II to assess depression…”).
What kinds of research questions are the methods employed in this study typically used to answer? This questions refers to research studies in general (not this study specifically); why might a researcher choose this design/approach (the approach you identified in #5)?
What are the implications of the sampling method on the external validity of the study (does the way the selected their sample and the participants they ended up with compromise to whom the results of the study will apply?)?
Are there any threats to internal validity that the researchers did a good job of addressing or that they did not address well (in other words—are there alternate explanations that fit the results better than the ones the author(s) provided)? Provide support for your response.
What was the goal of the statistical analysis in this study? Was it to describe frequency and averages, to explore relationships among variables or to test for differences between groups? Provide support for your response.
Considering the methods used in this study, including the sampling procedures, operationalization of the variables of interest and the statistical tests used, did the researchers draw reasonable conclusions based on the results? (In other words, have their conclusions gone beyond the data they have in hand?)
What are the real world implications of the study findings? Are the results meaningful and important for clinical practice? To whom might these results apply?
References
