Paper Outline

Here's what your paper should look like:

Intro

What this paper is about.  What question I’m asking and a few sentences on how I’m going to answer it.

Background

How we got here – this issue, problem.  Some history and general facts about the issue and the field.

Literature Review

You are giving these to me in draft.  They may need to be expanded, changed as you proceed with your research, but starting with a lit review enables you to ask good, informed questions in your research.


One thing a literature review accomplishes is to take the concepts you are interested in and turn them into something observable. Usually, that requires a set of choices as to how you are going to define your concept and then how to make measurable -- "to operationalize" -- your concept.  For example, here is a section of a paper on the power of agribusiness in the food system.  The authors looked at the literature on power and discussed the different ways other researchers have defined power in their studies. Then they chose a particular definition of power and explained why they made that choice.


To give you some idea of how to put together a literature review, I have marked up one of the literature reviews from an article I co-wrote on the politics of obesity. Take a look at the comments and highlights in yellow in the article, available here.

Method

This is where you talk about your research design.  First you should tell us your focused research question once again.  You can then bound your question by telling us what you aren’t going to research and why you are bounding your research in this way.  Then you should name your concepts and describe how you are operationalizing your concepts into constructs.  Finally, and this is important, you should tell us why your measurements are valid, that is, why they would stand up to a skeptical reading.  Then you should tell us why your method may not be valid (since all methods are imperfect) and open to biased results.  Then you can tell us why you think the results are still valid to some extent despite these imperfections. (Here’s where you can note the issue of limited time and resources, etc.)

Findings and Analysis

This is where you report on the data you have collected, what it means and how it answers your question.  You can also talk here about surprises, both in terms of the data being unexpected and in terms of the ways in which the research design may have been faulty.

Policy Options:

If you are doing a policy paper, here you lay out some possible options and the tradeoffs between options.  (We will talk about this some more in Weeks 7-8.)

Conclusion

Here you summarize how you have contributed to the larger questions covered in your literature review and what the implications of your results might be.  You could also tell us what you would do to further this research if you had more time.