SOCI: 4013: Sociology of Mental Health and Illness

This guide is designed to assist students to complete the research assignments for Dr. Hearne's class.

Assignment One

Research Paper Assignment One (Due: February 18th by 5:00pm- Late work will not be accepted)

The purpose of the research assignments is to familiarize you with the process of locating, reading, and analyzing peer-reviewed research. You will build on this assignment to complete your final project. This assignment is worth 5% of your final grade.

Your research topic is college student’s mental health and illness. You must focus on college students and a (only one) mental health outcome discussed in class.

You are responsible for the following:

  • Select a mental health topic of study. First, you should choose among 1) depression and anxiety, 2) ADHD, 3) addiction, or 4) mental health treatment. Then, you are required to focus on college students. In sum, the topic must be SOCIOLOGICAL and related to MENTAL HEALTH among COLLEGE STUDENTS.
  •  Locate FIVE research articles that you will use for your research paper. One of the articles must explicitly consider the impact of a social stratifier (i.e., ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class). All articles must be published in one of the 15 sociological journals I have approved. Do NOT use articles that were published prior to 2005 or based on a non-U.S. sample unless you receive special permission from me.
  • Once you have all five articles, provide an annotation for each article (see instructions below) and write one paragraph describing how the five articles you have fit together to describe mental health and illness among college students. To do this well, you will need to be able to articulate how each article independently fits into your paper and how each article complements the other articles to fit your paper.  
  • Your annotations should identify:
    1. the author(s)
    2. the author(s) institutional affiliations (i.e., where do the author(s) work?)
    3. the purpose of the study (i.e., what is the research question(s)?)
    4. the main themes of the literature review
    5. the theory
    6. the data
    7. the method of analysis
    8. the main findings
    9. research limitations listed by the author(s)
  • Please use bullet points to format your annotations. For example, use a bullet point to identify the authors, then another bullet point to identify their institutional affiliation(s), etc.
  • Use American Sociological Association (ASA) style for formatting your citations.
  • Provide the abstract for each article. You may copy and paste each abstract into one document.

 

Journals to Use

  1. American Journal of Sociology
  2. American Sociological Review
  3. Contemporary Sociology
  4. Journal of Health and Social Behavior
  5. Social Psychology Quarterly
  6. The Sociological Quarterly
  7. Social Forces
  8. Sociological Perspectives
  9. Sociology of Health and Illness
  10. Gender and Society
  11. Symbolic Interaction
  12. Sociological Spectrum
  13. Social Science & Medicine
  14. Social Science Research
  15. Critical Sociology