Name:

Date:

SCENARIO: Imagine that you work for a nonprofit organization that is focused on increasing
diversity in community groups in your area. Your supervisor asks you to develop a sociological
study concerning topics of diversity and collaboration in a specific community group of your
choice. Eventually you will prepare to share your research with colleagues.

ASSIGNMENT: For this Touchstone, you will begin by formulating a question about diversity in
a community group that you have access to. Then you will use the steps of the scientific method
to prepare a research plan, including a bibliography for a literature review. As you learned,
sociologists follow the scientific method so that their results are both scientifically valid and
useful to the greater sociological community. A literature review allows researchers to learn
from completed studies and to build upon their conclusions.

SOCI1010 Unit 1 Touchstone Template

Complete the following template, including all parts, using complete sentences.

STEP 1: Pick a Topic

Write a paragraph (approximately 6-8 sentences) describing the community group you have
chosen. Remember, it should be a group in which membership is voluntary and recreational.

In particular, be sure to answer the following questions:

● What is the community group?

● What are the attributes or characteristics of this community group? (e.g. What
activities does this group do together? What element of the members' interests or
identities brings them together? How is membership in the group defined, if at all?)
● What kind of experience with or access to this community group do you have?
STEP 2: Ask a Question

Formulate a research question related to this group, and to topics related to diversity and/or
collaboration. Write the question you have formulated for your study, and identify the
independent and dependent variables.

Remember, an independent variable is a variable that causes or drives a change in outcome.

A dependent variable is an effect, or a variable that is influenced by an independent variable.

Research question:

Independent variable:

Dependent variable:

STEP 3: Prepare a Bibliography

List 4-6 articles, books, or other resources that relate to your question for your literature
review.

Remember, attributes of good readings for your literature review include:

● They are academic, scholarly works about research findings or they are reliable
journalistic reporting based on scientifically credible and reliable data.
● They should have been published in the last 20 years—unless they are a landmark
work on the topic and provide important background or as a comparison.
● They look at different sides of the argument and a variety of perspectives.
● They do not have to be written by sociologists or published in sociology journals,
but they should be academic and not popular works.

Use the simplified method to format sources for your bibliography. Include five key elements
for each source, with each element separated by a period:

● Author’s name(s)
● Publisher and Publication date
 ● Title of the source, inside quotation marks
● Page numbers (if applicable)
● Source's location for web-based texts (URL)

Example:

1. Alireza Behtoui. Journal of Sociology, 2015. "Beyond social ties: The impact of social
capital on labour market outcomes for young Swedish people." p. 711-724.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1440783315581217

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