Final Project Assignment17.871Spring 2007Assignment summaryYou will make two oral presentations, of 15 minutes in length, and turn in a final research paper,15–20 pages long.PresentationsGeneral considerations. Both presentations will be limited to fifteen minutes, followed by fiveminutes of response from me and others in the class. We will therefore start on time (at 5minutes past the hour) and I will cut you off when 15 minutes have elapsed, precisely. Fifteenminutes go faster than you imagine. The best presentations will be those that have beenpracticed beforehand. Remember: you will be graded on the quality of your presentations. (Indeed, you will be graded more on the presentation itself than on whether you actually foundanything interesting in your research.) To improve presentation quality and to save time, youshould have handouts ready to distribute and/or have overheads ready to project. Make sure youhave taken care of the technical aspects of the presentation before the class time begins.When you are not presenting, you are participating by listening and giving feedback. You mustbe present for all the presentation sessions.First presentation. The first presentation should inform us of your subject, how you intend topursue it, the data you plan to use, and any special problems you think you will encounter.Inform us of your subject: What is the substantive issue you intend to pursue? What is the keypuzzle or question you wish to address. To whom would the issue be of interest? Have othersresearched this area before? If so, what have they found?How do you intend to pursue the subject: What are your major dependent variables (focus on oneor two). What are your major independent variables? What “unit of analysis” will you bestudying? (That is, will you be studying individuals, counties, countries, etc.?) Will this be atime series analysis? Cross-sectional? A combination?Your data: What would the ideal data be to do this project? If you can’t get your ideal data,what data can you get your hands on? Tell us actual sources. It would also be good at this pointto report descriptive statistics of your data set, graphs that show simple, basic relationships, etc.Special problems. Perhaps there’s a crucial variable that will be difficult or impossible tomeasure directly, or some regression assumption will be violated. Quantitative analysis is rarelystraightforward, so tell us any wrinkles you’ve encountered thus far, or anticipate encounteringover the next month.2Second presentation. The second presentation should summarize the basics of your firstpresentation and then report your findings. The summary of the first presentation should be verybrief, focusing on reminding us of the subject you are pursuing, your basic approach, and thesource(s) of your data. Your findings should be reported in much the way we learned dataanalysis in this subject. First, present your data. Identify the variables in your analysis: how arethey measured, what are their means and variances? Second, present the most importantbivariate relationships. This should be done with a series of well thought-out graphs. Third, present your multivariate analysis. Draw to our attention the core results and whether they confirm or disconfirm your orginal conjectures. Discuss any cases thatappear to be poorly described by your analysis and what might be done to correct this. Fourth,tell us what you conclude about your subject from the analysis you’ve done, how certain weshould be about those conclusions, and what alternative explanations or problems remain. Research paperThe logic of exposition in your research paper should roughly parallel the second presentation. The one section you should add at the beginning of the paper that you won’t want to talk toomuch about in the second presentation is a discussion of previous research. While you don’thave to do a comprehensive search of the literature, you need to do library work to see ifanyone has written about your topic before and (if they did) what they found. Don’t worry ifyou’ve found that someone has previously done something identical to your project. Replicationof others’ results is an important part of normal science.Journal articles in political science (which is the model your write-up should follow) oftenfollow this outline:I. IntroductionII. Literature reviewIII. DataIV. Model specification (i.e., what are the variables and how are they measured?)V. ResultsA. Preliminary results (simple relationships and a first cut at multivariateanalysis)B. Sensitivity analysis and other searches for anomaliesC. Re-estimation; further analysisVI. Discussion of results from a substantive perspectiveVII. ConclusionThe first page (after the title page) must have an abstract of no more than 250 words thatsummarizes your project and findings. The abstract page must contain your name and the title ofyour paper.The paper should be 15-20 pages long, including text, graphs, figures, appendices, andbibliography. There is no hard and fast page limit for the final page. Write succinctly. Edit.3Hone. Eschew verbiage. Make the text flow. If there’s a particularly long, involvedmethodological problem that you attend to, consider moving it to an appendix and only makereference to it in the body of the paper.Read Kate Turabian’s style book (A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, andDissertations) before you write your final draft. Follow this style book for most things. Inaddition, the American Political Science Review’s style sheet is the authority for special casesthat pertain to political science. The following URL contains information concerningcitations: http://depts.washington.edu/pswrite/cite.html. Look at recent editions of the AmericanPolitical Science Review or American Journal of Political Science to see how tables and figuresshould appear.Finally, there are some mechanical issues that you must attend to in writing ths paper. (Indeed,you should always attend to these issues when writing for the social sciences.) If you do notfollow these strictures, your paper will be returned to you for rewriting, possibly resulting inyour receiving an I for the subject. When you turn in your final paper, you will need to include acheck-list indicating that you have made sure it meets these criteria.Double-space everything, except footnotes and tables.Use footnotes, not endnotes.Use the author-date form of