Assignment 1 – ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and other documents. This will help you to learn how to conduct a literature review and it will enable you to locate documents that are relevant to your research. This assignment is worth 10% of your final grade. Reminder: Assignments MUST be completed in Microsoft Word and uploaded as an attachment into Blackboard.
Each citation is followed by about 100-150 words (which is approximately 6-7 sentences) that describes what the work is about. For example:
Collica, K. (2002). Levels of knowledge and risk perceptions about HIV among female
inmates in New York State: Can prison-based HIV programs set the stage for behavior
change? The Prison Journal, 82 (1), 101-124.
(**Notice that the citation is in APA format – for more examples, see the APA style list attached to this syllabus.)
This article is based on a study that was conducted with female inmates in New York State who were participating in a HIV peer education program called ACE (AIDS, Counseling, and Education) at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. All women who enter Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, the only maximum security prison for women in New York State, must participate in a series of workshops, over the course of two weeks, which focused specifically on HIV/AIDS information. Using a pre and posttest questionnaire, the author determined that female inmates who participated in the ACE program obtained increased knowledge about HIV infection and AIDS, and were able to conduct more reasonable risk assessments of their own behavior. After the conclusion of the ACE workshops, most of the women in the study expressed a strong desire to receive additional services from the ACE Program (i.e., discharge planning, HIV testing, counseling, additional courses, etc.), and many expressed a strong desire to modify their risky sexual and drug using behaviors.
The Process of Creating an Annotated Bibliography
1. Pick a topic in criminal justice that interests you. Maybe you are interested in sex offenders or serial killers. I am in interested in female inmates and HIV infection, hence, I am going to be looking for books and articles that deal specifically with this topic.
2. Narrow your topic down. A broad topic can be confusing and overwhelming. You may be interested in serial killers, but what about serial killers interest you specifically? Maybe you are interested in explaining the differences between the organized and disorganized killer, or the differences between male and female serial killers. In regards to my topic, female inmates and HIV is too broad of a topic. I will narrow my topic down to female inmates and HIV that have participated in a HIV prison-based peer program.
3. Devise a research question that will guide your search. For example, “Do male serial killers differ from female serial killers?” My question would be, “Do HIV prison-based peer programs increase levels of knowledge among participants?”
4. Locate citations that may be useful to your topic and that will help answer your research question. Briefly examine the works to determine if they are relevant. Focus on books and journal articles. You may use magazine and newspaper articles but only three. Do not use internet sources. Do not use textbooks.
5. Write a short summary of the work if it proves to be useful to your research. This is not a research paper, so please, only a summary. This also does not require you to read the entire work. You should be able to skim through it quickly to determine if it is relevant and to determine what the author is talking about.
6. You are required to have 10 sources and to follow the APA Citation Style.
7. After reviewing your annotated bibliography, I want you to devise a hypothesis. Now that you have read some works dealing with your topic, you should have a better idea of what you would find if you conducted a study on a similar topic. If you were conducting a real study, this is exactly the process you would use to begin your research. For example: “Female serial killers do differ from male serial killers.” I would propose the following question for my research study,
“Inmates who participate in HIV programs are more knowledgeable about HIV than inmates who do not participate in such programs.”
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