GUIDELINES FOR
ARTICLE SUMMARY/ANALYSIS
The
articles on the syllabus for Friday, May 7, address the relationship various
interpersonal factors and involvement in crime among young people. The primary purpose of this summary is to provide
additional information for our discussion of this topic, beyond the information
presented in our reading. Several
of you will be writing summaries of the same articles, so I will ask those
writing on the same articles to discuss their articles briefly as a group
at the beginning of class. On the
basis of that initial discussion, each group will report the significant findings
of the articles and will make contributions to our discussion of the topic.
An additional purpose of the summaries is to provide an opportunity
to practice writing analyses of reports of research.
This is a useful skill in school and in work that you may be called
on to do in some similar format in the future.
When people advertising for employees say they want candidates with
good communication skills, part of what they mean is the ability to “cut to
the quick” in reporting to others about a complex topic, either in writing
or orally. In this summary, this is
what you will be doing.
In
your summary you should 1) explain the issue(s) or question(s) the article
addresses, 2) briefly describe the methods that the author uses to address the
issues or questions, 3) summarize the major conclusions of the article, 4)
discuss the relationship of the findings of the article to the Warr’s
discussion in Chapter 5 concerning parents and delinquency and/or gender and
delinquency.
1.
Issues
or Questions
Each
article addresses specific issues or questions relevant to our consideration of
juvenile delinquency. Your explanation of
these issues or questions should be efficient but complete, so that the reader
knows quickly exactly what the purpose of the article is. As a part of this explanation, you should
also provide some background information from the article that addresses the
significance of the questions or issues.
Why are these specific questions or issues important? What past research or other factors make the
author’s investigation worthwhile?
2. Methods of Investigation
How
does the author of the article answer the questions or address the issues of
the article? In this section of your
summary, you should describe the information the author uses, how it was
collected, and how the information allows the author to draw conclusions. Some of the articles use sophisticated
statistical techniques to analyze data.
You do not need to explain these techniques. In fact, you can skim over the sections of the articles that
discuss data analysis if they get too complex for you to follow.
3.
Conclusions
What
conclusions does the author draw with regard to the specific questions or
issues that the article addresses?
Here again you need to be efficient and complete. Often the conclusions that authors reach are
highly qualified or limited, and you need to communicate the subtleties of the
author’s conclusions. In this section
you should address the research findings, not the overall significance of the
article.
4.
Relevance
to Chapter 5
In
this section, move beyond summary to a consideration of the implications of the
findings of the article for Warr’s discussion of the relative roles of parents and peers in explaining delinquency or
the relative roles of peers and/or
parents by gender in explaining delinquency.
How do the findings of the article add to, contradict, qualify, or
otherwise contribute to Warr’s discussion?
I
will grade your summaries on the basis of the following criteria: comprehensiveness,
clarity, and mechanics (spelling, grammar, and organization).
Your summaries should be no more than three double-spaced typed
pages, with 12-point font and one-inch margins.