Due: Thursday, 9/26 in class

Length: 2 - 3 pages (not including title page, references, and table)

Assignment:  To write a brief research paper about the relationship between liberal political beliefs and death penalty attitudes.  The data you will use comes from the questionnaire you filled out in class this week.  This paper will not be graded, but you should still focus on adhering to APA format throughout.  Your paper should consist of the following:

Title Page    See APA manual pp. 7-8, Stangor p. 293 for examples.

Introduction    This should be brief--no more than 2 paragraphs.  First you need to introduce the issue give background into the issue.
    You then need to cite one article in this section so that you can practice APA citation style.  Because this is a practice paper, everyone will cite the same article even though you havenít read it.  The article was published in 1983 by Phoebe C. Ellsworth and Lee Ross.  Its title is "Public opinion and capital punishment: A close examination of the views of abolitionists and retentionists."  The name of the journal is Crime and Delinquency, Vol 29, pages 116-169.  You should refer to this article by explaining that previous researchers have found that people's political ideology is associated with their death penalty attitudes.
    Finally, you need to set forth your hypothesis--even though it was really my hypothesis since I was the experimenter and you were the participants.

Method    You can, but don't have to, use subheadings, such as participants, procedure, and materials.  You should describe only the parts of the questionnaire you will be discussing, namely the liberalism question and the 6 death penalty questions.

Results    You need to report the correlation between liberalism and death penalty support.  You should also refer the reader to Table 1 for means of the two measures.
 
Discussion    In 1 or 2 paragraphs briefly discuss whether or not the results support your hypothesis, why or why not, and why we should care.  Are there any alternative explanations for your results seeing as they are correlational?
 
References    This should be a separate page, but should have one reference on it, the article listed above on this sheet.
 
Table      Table 1, the only table, should list the means and s.d. for the liberalism question and the DP scale.  See Stangor p. 313 for an example table.

Anything not on the list above need not be included.  So no need for an author's note, footnotes, abstract, or figures.  You'll also note I did you a favor and listed the components your paper should have in the order they should appear.

Formatting:
     As the APA manual says, all manuscripts should be double-spaced with standard margins.  Use APA style for the one citation.  You also need to use the header option on your word processor to give your manuscript a running head (something like "Liberalism and the Death Penalty") and page numbers in the upper right (see Stangor p. 294 for example).

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