Research Paper Prompts
Technical Requirements: Assignments should be typed using double-spacing and 12-point font with standard formatting and should be around 5-6 pages in length. When you reference a course reading, you should cite that reading using in-text citations in APA format. By “reference,” I mean when you refer to research findings in a particular reading or a concept or theory that is discussed in that reading. If you use a direct quote (more than 5 words, generally speaking), you must utilize quotation marks in addition to in-text citations in APA format. You do not need to submit a references/works cited page unless you utilize sources other than the course material. FAILURE TO UTILIZE QUOTATION MARKS IS PLAGIARISM.
Option 1: Women’s Work Interviews – For this assignment, you will conduct an informal interview with three different women who work in the criminal justice system or in a very closely related field (i.e. she works with criminal offenders in some capacity). You should anticipate each interview to last 45 minutes to an hour and it is important to stress to this person that the information gathered will only be used for a class assignment – this is not formal research but you should still approach the writing of this assignment with formality in mind.
Formulate a research question. Think of the content of the interview as being comprised of data that you’re analyzing to determine the answer to your research question. Your goal is to get a sense from this person of (a) what their agency does, (b) what role they serve in that agency, and (c) how gender influences the work. To get at this last point, you could ask questions along the lines of “As a woman, what kind of advice would you give to women who aspire to your career? How about for men?” or “How does gender influence your work?” or “How are the females that you work with different from the males” or even! “What has your experience been with transgender clients or offenders” (Although I suspect most people won’t have too much to talk about on this front!). You can discuss gender as it relates to the gender of the offenders or victims and as it relates to the worker and/or her colleagues.
Draft your own set of interview questions and provide me with a copy of them with the assignment itself (either as an appendix at the end or as a separate file). Take notes during your interviews and submit them along with the final product. Provide contact information for the individuals you interview as well. You do not need to reveal the specifics of the agency they work for, just the general type of agency. For instance, they might work at the Richmond County Jail, but you can state that they work at a jail. Your interviewees do not need to live locally.
Finally, write a paper that includes:
An introduction
A literature review that summarizes existing research on the career field and your research question (use course readings for this)
A brief research methods section (identifying how many interviews you did, how long they were, the characteristics of the people you interviewed, and how you conducted the interviews).
A results/findings section that includes a summary of the interview and compare and contrast their experience to that which is described in the course material.
A conclusion that provides an overall summary and a reflection with your overall thoughts about the job and career field.
Option 2: Critical Media Analysis – For this assignment, you will conduct a critical media analysis of at least FIVE HOURS worth of a television program OR a film or book series that features women (heterosexual women, lesbian women, transwomen… it’s your choice) as workers in the criminal justice system OR as female offenders. Generally, you will discuss the depiction of these women (the work they do, what causes their offending, what the consequences of their offending are, etc.) and compare and contrast these depictions to what the course material reports. (To do this, you must summarize what the scholarly literature says, as discussed in our course material.).
To critically analyze these depictions, DON’T just summarize the media/episodes. Rather, think very carefully about the way women are portrayed, perhaps as compared to men or perhaps just in their own right.
Formulate a research question. Think of the content of the television program as containing data that you’re analyzing to determine the answer to your research question – this really is a content analysis. Here are some questions you *could* pose to help you formulate your research question. What words are used to describe these women? What are they shown doing or experiencing? How many women experience X or Y in this series? How does all this compare to how the men are portrayed? Is their portrayal accurate, when compared to scholarly literature?
Next, determine how you will analyze the data (data = media content) to answer your question. Scholars who conduct content analysis create coding schemes and coding sheets. I will provide you an example! Basically, though, you make a list of certain things you’re looking for so that you can make note of each instance where you see those things. This way, you can determine how commonly the things occur. How simple versus complex and in-depth those coding schemes or coding sheets is going to depend upon your research question. You must submit the coding sheet with your final paper. I am happy to look over it in advance, and you could use the example as well.
After analyzing your media, write a paper that includes:
An introduction,
A literature review that summarizes the scholarly literature on the topic (as discussed in our course readings)
A brief methods section where you describe the media/program itself, why you chose the particular media and the episodes that you chose, and how you analyzed it
A results/findings section
A discussion section where you compare and contrast the media depictions to that which is described in the course material
A conclusion that provides an overall summary of the paper as well as a reflection on the significance of these depictions of women overall for society
Option 3: Literature Review – Conduct an in-depth literature review of a pre-approved topic as listed below. These are topics that are either not covered in depth in the course material, or are covered in depth but the course material is dated and worthy of being updated! This MUST include research on women as OFFENDERS or as WORKERS in the criminal justice system. You must include at least 5 scholarly (SCHOLARLY!!!) journal articles, government reports, or technical reports from a reputable and independent criminal justice organization (such as The Marshall Project, The VERA Institute, the Urban Institute).
Pre-Approved Topics
Transgender women’s experiences with incarceration
Transgender women’s experiences in the criminal justice system more broadly
Gang-involved women and girls: research since Jody Miller’s book was published
Sex and gender disparities in capital punishment
An intersectional analysis of some part of the criminal justice system, such as Native American women’s experiences as police and correctional officers or Latina girls’ experiences in the juvenile justice system
Once you have your topic and your scholarly sources, write a paper that includes:
An introduction to the paper (tell me what you’ll tell me in the paper)
An explanation of the literature you found on the topic (tell me)
A conclusion that provides an overall summary (tell me what you told me)
REMEMBER:
(1) The ultimate goal of a literature review is to tell your reader what the discipline of criminal justice already knows about the topic at hand, with the assumption that they don’t know anything about the topic.
(2) A good literature review IS NOT simply paragraph on each scholarly source that you find! It DOES NOT simply list study after study, publication after publication and summarize them individually.
(3) A good literature review compares and contrasts similar studies to provide readers with a full picture of what an entire body of literature says. Find patterns in the literature and distinguish studies from one another in this way. You then organize your paper accordingly. It could be could be similarities in the way research was conducted (i.e. Quantitative studies show x and y… versus Qualitative studies suggest x too, but also z…), similarities in findings, similarities in the samples, similarities in the way the studies defined key concepts, and those are just some examples. A good literature review also recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of various studies, as well as assesses the literature on the topic as a whole for what it has YET to uncover—what we still don’t know but should know about the topic!
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