COM 201 Small Assignment #1: 
Identifying Social Scientific Research Articles

Locate an article about communication that interests you for class on Wednesday, September 12.

You should try to locate a journal article in which social scientific research has been conducted.  Some social scientific methods that might be used in the study include content analysis, survey/questionnaire, experiment, focus groups, some kinds of interviews, and observational research/ethnography.

EX1:   The persuasiveness of messages used in HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns
EX2: The effects of deception on trust in a relationship

  1. Make a copy of the article.  If the article is more than 10 pages, you only have to bring the first 9 pages and the last full page of the article to class.
  2. Print off the page from the library that helped you locate this article in the first place.  This page will usually contain information about the author, article and journal titles, and a summary (abstract) of the article content.  If you did not use the library web pages to locate the article (i.e., you went to the library and just started looking at journals on the shelf until you found a good article), you may skip this step.
  3. Bring both of the above to class.
NOTE:  For the assignments in this class, we will be using journal articles only.  Newspaper articles, books, magazines, and so forth, will not fulfill the requirements for assignments, so please be sure to choose the correct type of source.