Choose a topic covered within communication studies that you might be interested in using for your capstone project. If you need help picking one, think about the classes you have taken and what you studied in those or what we label as the major categories of communication within our department (family relationships, close relationships, persuasion, health, conflict, organizational processes, groups and teams, leadership and follower-ship). Once you have chosen the topic, complete the following:
use the library databases or Google Scholar to complete a search for articles on your topic. Flag or download 5 articles that have the following characteristics (there are hypotheses, a methods section, and a results section that includes numbers other than percentages).
Read the abstracts of each article. Choose three of your favorites and complete reference worksheets for them. Remember that the purpose of a reference worksheet is to summarize the article content in your own words rather than copying and pasting the information from the article. The only information that may be copied and pasted is the hypotheses.
Make a list of all of the variables that have been included in the hypotheses for your articles. Remember that variables can be independent/grouping variables or dependent/outcome variables. All variables are included in the hypotheses and discussed in the methods section where it lists how they are measured.
Choose five of the variables you identified. Write three hypotheses about the relationship you think exists between or among the variables. You may not use any of the hypotheses included in your published articles so create different combinations of variables. Remember to use the principles we talked about for developing strong hypotheses.
For three of the variables, you identified in your articles and used in your hypotheses, find the original scales that were used to measure those variables (the article from which the scale was taken will be listed in the Methods section under a heading typically called scales, instrument, or measures). This may require you to use the methods section to find the reference and then trace it back to where the original scale came from.
Once you have completed these tasks, you are going to turn in the following as a single Word document (.doc or .docx):