Yhtomit 201700603

Next week you have your Ethics Paper Reference List due.  The assignment instructions read (yellow emphasis and bold mine):  “For your Ethics Paper, you are required to have at least 10 empirical articles to support your writing. All articles must be empirical, and at least half of them must be recent (2000 or later).” Proper use of current APA format.

So there is not confusion about what an empirical article is, I wanted to touch base with you about the difference between an empirical journal article vs. a theoretical journal article vs. a literature review

Empirical articles (the ones you need to use for your ref list and paper) are intended to address a specific research question and test a specific hypothesis via data collection and analysis.  

Theoretical articles are based on theoretical contexts, models, frameworks, etc. These articles usually do not include empirical/research data (although they might use secondary data to support certain conclusions) but, instead, attempt to make connections between concepts and ideas to define or advance a theoretical position. 

Literature reviews are similar to theoretical papers in that they do not use original data collected by the author(s) of the article. Instead, lit reviews summarize, synthesize, discuss, and criticize existing research and hopefully, show gaps in the research.

As indicated above, for your Ethics Paper Reference List, Rough Draft, and Final Paper, you will need at least 10 empirical, peer-reviewed journal articles.  You are welcome to use additional references/sources, including theoretical articles, lit reviews, and books, once you have the 10 required empirical articles.  The more references the better (well, most of the time. :D)   It will be evident from your writing and citing of sources what sources were used to build your paper.  Just a word of caution:   Make sure to build your paper around empirical research, not theoretical contexts or frameworks.

One of the "quickest" ways to determine whether or not an article is empirical is to read the abstract.  If the abstract mentions a study that was done with participants and briefly summarizes the results, it is very likely an empirical article.

An empirical article usually has these sections:

1. Introduction/Literature review

2. Method

3. Results

4. Discussion

5. References 

I wish I had an easy system you could follow to find empirical articles.   You might want to try adding the words "research" or "study" to your search terms.  I typed in the words "research and ethics and group counseling" and got several promising hits.  I attached one of the articles that came up.  You will notice this article reports on an actual study that was conducted.  It has the following sections: Introduction/Background, Method, Results, and Discussion. 

This next article is an example of a theoretical article.  In brief, this article looks at various group interventions that counselors can use in school-based settings when working with children exposed to domestic violence.  It has a lot of good information.  However, it is not an empirical article.  It does not report on a specific research study.   The authors used secondary data to make treatment recommendations, but no original research was conducted.  Thus, while this is a very interesting article, it would NOT count as one of the 10 empirical sources you need to use for this paper.  You could use the article in addition to the 10 empirical ones, but, again, itwouldn’t count as an empirical article. 

Finally, the last article is a literature review.   In brief, this article reviews the literature on the growing number of interventions that use religion and spirituality in group counseling.  The authors also offer some practical suggestions for counselors. As with the theoretical article above, this would NOT count as one of the 10 empirical sources you need to use for this paper as this is not an empirical research paper.  Like the theoretical article, you could use the article in addition to the 10 empirical ones, but, again, it wouldn’t count as an empirical article. 

Hope this information helps.  Please remember, find you will need to find 10 empirical articles for the ref list assignment and paper.