SCHOLARLY VS. POPULAR MEDIA FOCUS ON SEXUALITY PAPER

It is a common experience among students in college courses to be told they must access x-number of scholarly publications, read and critically analyze the material accessed and synthesize it into a “research paper” or essay. Did you ever wonder why? This paper assignment will guide you through an examination of possible answers to that question and consideration of the relative value of scholarly vs. popular media presentations on human sexuality. You are asked to approach the work without a preformed perspective on which of these two approaches to information dissemination is the better form and to formulate your conclusion as you work through the steps below.

Research that can be classified as human sexuality related is very prevalent in modern society, but not all of it is conducted using the “scientific method” in a primary focus is on eliminating as many extraneous explanations for the results and as much researcher bias toward a particular result trend as possible. In scholarly publications the researchers’ peers in their discipline of study review the work with a goal being that consumers of it may be assured that it is not merely personal opinion or manipulating a study method until desired results are achieved.

One might argue that the opposite of information grounded in the scientific method is frequently found in popular media where there abounds an abundance of unsubstantiated opinion. The question is, does that reality render the information of little or no value? Is there a true need for it or is popular media just good at figuring out what people likely want to be told and serve that up to them for profit? Or are the scholarly types too egg-heady to see the value of alternative, more popular variations on the same phenomena they are studying presented in a way that many more can relate to and understand?

In this assignment, you will explore the pros and cons, the relative value of each type of information by comparing and contrasting a peer-reviewed scholarly journal article with related content covered by a popular media outlet.

This assignment proceeds in three steps.

Step 1:
You will begin by reading an article from a “peer-reviewed” academic journal or organizational journal located in the APUS online library and writing a one page summary of it. NOTE: Articles located in the Course Materials folder are samples of peer-reviewed journal article appearance and contents to help you know what to look for in the APUS Online Library and cannot be used in the completion of this assignment. Academic peer-reviewed journals and professional organization journals have in common that colleagues of the article authors have reviewed either the scientific integrity of the particular research findings or the validity of the authors’ expertise in the case of professional organization journals. In either case, those who favor peer-reviewed, scholarly research approaches to gathering and sharing information with others and believe that one can be relatively sure of the validity of what one reads in these publications. It is worth noting that historically, this has not always been the case. Several researchers well known in their day are now infamously known for falsifying data. Another key feature of such writings is that the authors (the falsifying ones not included) welcome testing and retesting of their hypotheses (sometimes this can go on for decades as new ways of studying the research questions emerge and if future research results counter their findings they aren’t territorial or ego focused but instead happy to have the body of knowledge concerning the topic expanded on or corrected if needed.

Examples of a peer-reviewed and two organizational journals are:
• The Annual Review of Sexual Research, the 2007 18th volume of which contains an article titled Infidelity in Dating Relationships
• The Publication of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists, the May 2010 volume of which contains an article on Sexual Privacy in the Digital Age
• Military Medicine, the 175, 6:424, 2010 volume of which contains an article titled, The Role of Emotional Numbing in Sexual Functioning Among Veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

The above articles are in the Course Materials folder in the classroom as samples of what articles in these two types of publications look like. They should prove helpful if you haven’t had a lot of experience with peer-reviewed articles and they are but three of the many, many scholarly articles published yearly by researchers of sexuality. Our University library has vast holdings and you shouldn’t have any trouble locating articles on sexuality. If you need a bit of a leg up with navigating the online library, there is a tutorial located at http://www.apus.edu/Online-Library/1-home%20page%20modules/support-pages/starting.htm One good way to be efficient in your article selection process is to read the brief italicized summary paragraph, or “abstract” at the top of its first page. This is a synopsis of the focus of the article and abstracts are a lot easier to read through during the selection phase. Once you have located two or three articles of interest, you can then select one from those rather than attempting to read through every article in full before choosing one.

Your 1-page summary of the single scholarly article you select will:

• Indentify the authors, the journal, the year date of publication and focus of the research
• Describe the hypothesis of the study if it was an actual experiment or the key components of the article if it isn’t one based on what one would typically think of as an experimental study with subjects, laboratory settings, variable controls, etc. (the article Sexual Privacy in the Digital Age is an example of the non-experiment type). Both types of articles can be found in our library. You shouldn’t use articles that summarize other researchers or authors studies. One important tip is to select an article of reasonable length because one is limited in what one can cover in a page and some of the articles can be quite lengthy. If you come across an article that really grabs your interest and illuminates your understanding of a topic, you can always save it for your own knowledge even if you don’t base your paper on it (your prof has oodles of those kinds of articles and in our digital age, one doesn’t have to worry about one’s overloaded books shelf one day collapsing).
• Describe how the study was conducted including
 The group of people researched and written about (college students?…adolescents?…elders?…military members?…internationals?…professionals?…parents or families?…sexual minorities?…etc)
 The methodology used (i.e. naturalistic observation, lab experiment—yep, we still do those–case study, survey, etc) if the article was a true experiment style one
• Describe the results of the study or the conclusions the author of a non-experiment type research article reached. (Here’s a tip if you are reading and reviewing an experiment style study: I always find it helpful to read the introduction at the beginning and the conclusion at the end first (it’s not a mystery novel with a surprise ending, after all, although research results can sometimes surprise) and then read through the methodology and results sections because those typically are the most technical and data detailed and being already aware of the introduction ideas and the conclusions reached at the end can help one follow the data heavy results section. You aren’t expected to be an expert research critic. The goal is to summarize what the authors studied in what group of people for what reason and what they concluded.

Step 2:
You will then access a popular media focus of the same topic and write a 1-page review of it, in which you describe its content and presentation style, its contributing sources and their credentials as presented by the media. Some examples of popular media for this step include:
 USA Today
 Psychology Today
 Newsweek
 Time
 askmen.com
 drruth.com

Tabloids, blogs, Wikipedia, TV shows and movies can’t be used for this assignment, although several of these are highly sexualized. Tabloids deal in the purely sensational and are primarily celebrity watching publications, blogs don’t yet have a wide enough readership to be viewed as generically popular media, Wikipedia isn’t something we use for any work in CHFD220 and TV shows and movies aren’t presented in article form.

Step 3:

In a third and fourth page of the paper, you will compare the article from Step 1 with the article from Step 2, addressing the following:

 What do they have in common?
 Other than visually, how are they most different?
 What is the value for consumers encountering each?
 What are the cons associated with the way each is presented?
 Assume, even if not fully embracing the idea, that both are important. Argue both sides of the issue brief, that the scholarly approach is best and explain why and then that the widely available, popular media, commercialized approach is best and explain why.
 Why do you think professors tout peer-reviewed and professional org publications and force students to incorporate them into their written work when the other means of handling sexuality are so popular? For that matter, why formally study sex at all? If it’s such a common experience, shouldn’t most of the information come to us as experience through common sense?

Conclusion:

Briefly conclude, in approximately a half page, with insights that you gained from conducting the review, summary and comparison of these two forms of information concerning how they present and how interesting and reliable their information “feels” as you read through them.

General Writing Expectations
You paper needs to be written as a narrative with no lists or bulleted items and should avoid first person singular “I” and second person “you” pronouns and shouldn’t be written in creative writing style (“Imagine for a moment that…” or starting the first page with a question or “Webster’s Dictionary defines ______ as…” are three common mistakes with this type of paper that needs to get right into the facts—like that old Dragnet TV show where Detective Joe Friday was known for frequently saying, “Just the facts, ma’am,” when the person he was interviewing as part of an investigation strayed into creative narrative) and be careful with spelling and grammar, of course.

This work about scholarly vs. popular media has to lean toward the scholarly side in formatting, in which not as much variation is allowed as in popular modalities. Your report must follow these formatting guidelines:

• The paper must be formatted in APA style. Your prof understands that APA formatting can be a bit like learning a second language and has placed several APA formatting guides in the classroom Course Materials folder.
• A cover page and “References” page are required and don’t count toward the paper body page length.
• You are not required to use headings in the paper but a “running header” is required. The APA guides loaded in the classroom Course Materials folder include examples of this formatting convention.
• Source crediting must be included in the paper body and at the end of the paper on a separate page titled “References” (without the quotation marks). Quoting is permitted but only very sparingly (one to two brief sentences per page) and it must be placed inside quotation marks and properly source credited. Failure to source credit and correctly quote, even if not intended, is, by definition, plagiarism and will result in an a zero assignment score for a first instance and course failure for a second occurrence in any other assignment without option for revision and resubmission to recoup lost points.
• Size 12 point font or smaller must be used throughout including the cover page and one inch margins must be used on all sides (if you are short by a line or two on a particular page you won’t be penalized, but all papers will be evaluated per one inch margins and size 10 or 12 fonts, so if you use a font larger than size 12 and/or one or more margins wider than one inch, you will run the risk of not realizing that the paper will be showing as falling well below the required length when opened on your prof’s side of the screen).

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