Now, onto my completely different research project.
The overall trends in the feedback I received included confusing sections and abrupt transitions. I also really valued Max's comment on restating my purpose throughout to remind the reader what I am doing and why. I think definitely at some points of my paper it seems to go down a rabbit hole of information and it is necessary to go back to the overall intentions of researching the structure of Disney movies to find motivations of the company.
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| Me getting comfortable in the Rabbit Hole |
When grading myself using the rubric, I felt like I fulfilled the "understand and analyze argument" sections and also the sources and evidence section in my literature review. However, I can improve in the "research design" section since I have a clear purpose and all the sources, but I am lacking in some of the connections. Again as a consequence of the confusing parts, I feel like I am also missing points in the "establish argument" section where I need to take my results and thoroughly discuss the limitations. Luckily, I am actually doing well with the word count, so I can go back and make the connections more explicit.
Another section I could possibly lose points on is distinguishing my voice from sources. I need to fix my credibility assessments to focus more on the writer's conclusions, as Max pointed out on my paper. This way I will be able to show their results, and the MY conclusions to how they fit in my argument.
Finally, looking ahead to the presentation really scares me. I have a lot of information especially in my literature review that I am not sure how I am going to cut it down. I think once I am able to figure out the lit review part, the rest of the presentation should be okay. One trap I see myself falling into is only reporting the larger results, which I think could be a negative since it would not show the nuances to my findings.
Hi Grace!
ReplyDeleteI thoroughly enjoyed reading your paper, as it is a topic that I found great interest in! I think that you did a great job, as you stated, explaining the relevance of your various sources and the multiple perspectives on your topic throughout your paper, but I'm going to give a brief overview of what I thought about each section in your paper.
In your Literature Review, I feel that you could expand on the credibility of your sources without your voice getting lost. Right now, you mainly state the claims of your various sources, but not how qualified they are. Additionally, with regards to your transitions, you change topics without enough of a justification as to why the reader is examining a particular thing. For example, I was a little confused when you jumped from talking about labor divisions to family structure when first explaining the premises of Marxism. You could also connect more of your claims to each other, particularly when examining Disney and its motivations and the studies that were conducted. There are also a few organizational tweaks that I suggested in my comments on your paper in order to make your thought process more clear to the reader.
Regarding your Methods section, I liked how you clearly explained the purpose of your methods at the beginning of this section and how best to achieve an answer to your research question through the use of a content analysis and a thematic analysis. However, I would make sure to avoid the use of passive voice and first person in your paper. Also, make sure to define some terms throughout this section for your reader, such as "authority measurement." You should focus on how replicable your research is, and adjust the clarity of your explanations accordingly. Although, I really liked your clear explanation of how you would analyze the gender roles data!
With regards to your Results section, I know you voiced your concerns regarding how best to visually represent your data. I agree that a thorough explanation of a single character -- including details about the notes you took and figures of what categories the character fell into -- would be the best option for your reader, since this would not be overwhelming, and would establish the credibility of you, as a researcher. I would also split up the coded content analysis section from the thematic analysis section with subtitles in order to make your paper easier to read and follow. Make sure to also be consistent with your tables, including the movie in parentheses and italics next to each character's name.
Lastly, I would spend time adding to your discussion section. Using subtitles to differentiate between your general conclusions, the connections to past studies, the significance of your research, the limitations, and the suggestions for future research would better the flow of your paper and would make your paper easier to read. I would suggest adding to your conversation with the sources in your literature review in order to make your research appear to be more complex. Mention particular sources and how your data specifically relates to them. Additionally, I would synthesize all of the general conclusions that you made in your Results section in order to put them in conversation with one another. I feel that you should add to your limitations, as well as your suggestions for future research, which I explain further in my comments.
I wish you the best of luck in completing this final paper!
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Hi Grace!
ReplyDeleteYour research is super interesting, and something that I would never consider looking into, despite the major role that Disney played in my childhood. So, kudos on picking such a cool topic! I pretty much liked how you set up your paper, but I thought it ended on a whimper, especially in your discussion section. You sort of just let the significance from your original research gap in the literature review go, and reported on what you found. The lack of interpretations in the discussion also contributed to its short length. Here's my critique section-by-section:
For the literature review, at points it is unclear which voice is yours and which are the sources. A specific point on the rubric is distinguishing between your voice and the sources, so I would improve that aspect of the LR. Moreover, the way of you establish the importance of your research is overly reliant on sources; for instance, you just talk about how some researchers say that Disney can be formative to children. instead, I think the significance of your research is in the prevalence of Disney in society and American culture. You should provide some illustrative stats and examples here to convince me. Moreover, you don't convince me that Disney movies are teaching tools, so I am left unconvinced about the significance of your project slightly. If you articulate this, your LR wll be solid.
For the methods, I thought they were pretty strong. You assumed some knowledge on our part in biological vs. psyschological sex, which took me a few pages to understand what you meant. But that could just be being dumb. Moreover, I would integrate your intra-reader reliability with the coding section, because the reader is left wondering about intra-reader reliability until the end of the methods. I think you obfuscate the lit review and the methods at points... you need to establish hypothesis and importance in the lit review rather than the methods. Other than that, it looks good.
In the results, I think the tables are a solid way of portraying results, but I would prefer Venn Diagrams perhaps, with little descriptions too. Moreover, you assume that the reader knows the plot/themes of the films, so perhaps a little background on major plot/themes of the movies could be a good start for results. I like the idea of providing illustrative examples throughout your methods (or even for a specific character), since your results seem to just come out of nowhere and we just trust your percentages. Taking us through your thought process for a character would be fantastic, as I particularly enjoyed the examples (e.g., Incredibles) you showed. ADD MORE EXAMPLES... they're really cool and easy to do.
Your discussion is lacking in my opinion... you never connect back to Disney in terms of society, and you're completely missing the significance of your research... relate it back! Your future directions are solid though.
Check out the feedback doc, and I hoped this helped you out...
Yash
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Hey Grace! So I just wanted to begin by saying I’m glad that I was able to finally read your research. I know that I had gotten bits and pieces about what it was about over the year, but I didn’t really fully understand until now. I can tell that you worked hard this year with your project, and so you should be proud of what you have done. That being said, there are still some things that could be worked on, and so, to resolve these issues, I included my impressions of each section down below:
ReplyDeleteLiterature review: This section made me use the c-word: credibility. Although you include lots of sources and cite a lot of people, you do not say why these people are credible and why they should be trusted. The other problem that I had with this section was with your explanation and connections for capitalism, gender roles, power structures, and the family structure. I can vaguely see how some of these topics are related, but, after reading the section, I was still left confused about how family and gender roles perpetuate capitalism.
Methods: Again, credibility. Just stating who said something is not sufficient for saying why they should be listened to. Also, I think that it would be useful to strengthen your justification for why you chose thematic and content analyses instead of just saying those are the two ways of doing this. On the positive side though, I think that you did an especially good job laying out what the four personality types you were looking for were.
Results: First of all, I believe that I found a better way of listing the two-trend analysis for fathers, mothers, and children. Instead of using tables, basically create a graph where dominance and submissiveness are on the positive and negative sides of the x axis, and masculinity and femininity are on the positive and negative axes of the y-axis. You can then plot where each character aligns on the graph to show how strongly they align to the categories created (I included a link for you to visualize this in the comments). Anyways, for the results, I agree that maybe going through the process for a single character would be useful to see how you developed all of these conclusions.
Discussion: Truthfully, I felt pretty “meh” about this section. The discussion is supposed to be the most complex and nuanced part of the paper where you integrate everything from the rest of the paper to create cohesive understanding of what you did. Not only is this section supposed to answer your research question, but it is supposed to include the implications and limitations of your research, as well as for future directions for where the field could go. You restate your question and hypothesis and answer the question, but the explanation for why you got the answer you got was lacking. I think that you do a good job of trying to explain disney’s motives for why you got the results that you did, but I don’t think you made that final step of explaining the implications of them doing this. Additionally, there is no mention of the morals included in the stories, which was a pretty big point in your literature review, and something I would think ties into the inclusion of traditional family values. Lastly, what is the big picture of everything that you found and did?
Anyways, I know that some of my remarks may have been a little sassy, but its all for a good reason. I think that your project definitely still needs some work, but I believe in you and your project. Keep up the good work and feel free to reach out if you need help!
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