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Writing the Empirical Social Science Research Paper: A Guide for the Perplexed

Abstract Students sometimes find the general process of writing an empirical research paper to be daunting. Yet, when the process is approached in a systematic way, students can become more comfortable with the writing and standard formatting used in an empirical article. Accordingly, the current paper serves as a template for the budding social scientist.

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Students sometimes find the general process of writing an empirical research paper to be daunting. Yet, when the process is approached in a systematic way, students can become more comfortable with the writing and standard formatting used in an empirical article. Accordingly, the current paper serves as a template for the budding social scientist. In it, I describe the various sections of a research paper in order to illustrate the structure of an introduction, methods section, results section, and discussion section in a format fitting for the 6th edition of the American Psychological Association. As in most empirical research papers, the first section is an abstract, a short outline of the paper that clarifies both what the paper will be examining, what is found, and in most cases a one line explanation of why the findings are important to the field. Accordingly, this paper should help to clarify the process of producing an empirical article.

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Weather you are doing a bachelor's or a higher level studies , it is important to do academic writing. This paper gives a summary of the different types of academic writing process and aspect related to academic writing. The paper is a review of works done on the subject matter.

Social Science Writing

Ricardo Stanton-Salazar

I’ve put together three documents composed of my own study notes on the process of writing in the social sciences. Notes include items taken from the internet and written by various scholars who address the “how tos” of writing social science papers, dissertations, and journal articles. Other notes are taken from various personal documents I’ve developed over my three decades of teaching sociology and education studies. I hope you find them helpful. RDSS

, I’ve put together three documents composed of my own study notes on the process of writing in the social sciences. Notes include items taken from the internet and written by various scholars who address the “how to-s” of writing social science papers, dissertations, and journal articles. Other notes are taken from various personal documents I’ve developed over my three decades of teaching sociology and education studies. I hope you find them helpful. RDSS

Professor Jason Miin-Hwa Lim

Novice writers and university students often encounter problems with regard to (i) the extent to which they should include research questions and hypotheses in their research reports, and (ii) how they can effectively present these information elements to enhance clarity. To resolve these problems, we used a genre-based analytical framework and inputs provided by specialist informants to ascertain the prevalence of these information elements and the range of linguistic resources employed by writers in the research article introductions (RAIs) in two social sciences, namely Ethnic Studies (ES) and Industrial Relations (IR). We have found that most RAIs in IR incorporate research questions and hypotheses, while less than half of those in ES include them. The difference is attributable to writers' greater tendency to employ epistemological methodologies in IR, and ontological methodologies in ES. Polar questions are rarely used in both disciplines, while factual, evaluative and circumstantial wh-questions are far more prevalent. Active anticipatory verbs and that-clauses are used to postulate hypotheses in both disciplines, whereas first-person pronouns are far more common in ES than in IR. Our findings can be flexibly adapted to design instructional materials aimed at guiding novice writers in the formulation of research questions and hypotheses.

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Empirical Research

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• First Online: 22 May 2017
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• Emeka Thaddues Njoku 2  

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The term “empirical” entails gathered data based on experience, observations, or experimentation. In empirical research, knowledge is developed from factual experience as opposed to theoretical assumption and usually involved the use of data sources like datasets or fieldwork, but can also be based on observations within a laboratory setting. Testing hypothesis or answering definite questions is a primary feature of empirical research. Empirical research, in other words, involves the process of employing working hypothesis that are tested through experimentation or observation. Hence, empirical research is a method of uncovering empirical evidence.

Through the process of gathering valid empirical data, scientists from a variety of fields, ranging from the social to the natural sciences, have to carefully design their methods. This helps to ensure quality and accuracy of data collection and treatment. However, any error in empirical data collection process could inevitably render such...

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Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Oyo, 200284, Nigeria

Emeka Thaddues Njoku

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David A. Leeming

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Njoku, E.T. (2017). Empirical Research. In: Leeming, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_200051-1

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_200051-1

Received : 01 April 2017

Accepted : 08 May 2017

Published : 22 May 2017

Publisher Name : Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

Print ISBN : 978-3-642-27771-9

Online ISBN : 978-3-642-27771-9

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