The Research Essay
The essay will be 7-8 pages (typed and double-spaced in Times New Roman 12 point font) and 1750-2000 words in length (excluding title page, references, appendices, and bibliography). A title page, a bibliography and Chicago Manual of Style footnotes or endnotes are all required components of your paper.
The grading rubric at the end of the course outline will be used for assessment. Students are encouraged to review the rubric to better understand how the assignment will be graded and to seek clarification if necessary. The assignment is worth 25% of your course grade.
Research and Sources
There isn’t a set requirement for the number of sources that need to be relied upon, but a good rule of thumb would be aiming for at least half the page length (so in this case a minimum of 4 scholarly books or academic journal articles is quite reasonable). The quality or appropriateness of materials is far more important than the quantity of sources referenced. It is also particularly important that materials consulted and referenced are used appropriately and students are advised to be very careful with using internet sites or even “official” documents from the internet (whether they were obtained through crude internet browser searches or through other means) in their research paper. Web retrieved materials vary considerably in quality and in sharing original context or methodology and other parameters. Media sources (including journalistic ones) are often not sophisticated enough to be worthwhile research materials for academic essays either.
Compounding such problems is the fact that increasingly illegitimate resources are being produced by organizations with “an agenda”, and these materials are frequently being crafted in such a way as to potentially resemble good materials or intentionally confuse people as to whether legitimate sources are truly legitimate. For instance, a journal may be produced by an anti-vaccination protest group or a statistical report will be detached from the information regarding how it compiled its data or a pseudo-poll is provided as a counter perspective of a rigorously designed one and the information that is being retained and shared generally misinforms people by skewing much of the data. Even governments can directly produce or point to such highly flawed data, for instance when a committee or task force is created to make assessments, but it is not allowed the opportunity to look at all the appropriate measures. More specifically this can be illustrated by considering that a hypothetical (or maybe a real) task force is restrained from or given direction that it is not permitted to examine revenue generation along with expenditure reduction options, or perhaps a committee shares data and indicates that certain measures are speculative or an amalgamation, but it could either attempt to hide this explanation, make it difficult to discover, or such important distinctions are hidden when this data get uncovered by another source which then reproduces it or reframes it in a new source or communication. Students are strongly encouraged to conduct the bulk of their research through the MRU library interface, or similar research databases, which will significantly (though not entirely) reduce the chance of your paper including such poor-quality resources.
Generative AI
Students are encouraged to refrain from using generative AI, as it can hinder the development of critical thinking skills and general understanding of subsequent material. Despite this recommendation, any reliance on AI by a student will need to be acknowledged with a paragraph following your assignment that explains what it was used for and the prompts that were given – failure to do so is in violation of academic honesty policies. Additional points on using this technology are outlined near the end of this assignment page.
Political socialization, or the process by which a political culture is transmitted from generation to generation, has long been recognized as something that shapes the way that individuals in a society come to understand their political system. While agents of socialization may have diversified, what else has changed in this process in more recent times? In what way(s) have new challenges or opportunities emerged because of these changes? Evaluate and explain.
