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Summary
You will write a 1200-word essay drawing on your research into some aspect of gender relations.
Gender relations
Like our essay readings, your Gender Relations Research Essay should be about a specific aspect of gender relations.
- Tannen, in You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, focuses on female-male conversation.
- Monsour, et al., in “Challenges Confronting Cross-Sex Friendships: Much Ado about Nothing?” studied challenges to male-female friendships.
- Reeder, in �'I Like You . . . As a Friend': The Role of Attraction in Cross-Sex Friendship,� studied types of attraction in male-female friendships.
- Werking, in her two excerpts, studied attraction between heterosexual and homosexual friends and also the support that friendships provide for marriages.
We'll interpret "gender" broadly to include alternative sexualities, so apart from female-male relationships, you could consider writing an essay about friendship between straight and gay males, for instance. You could also write about friendships among straight males, for instance, if your argument explores how gender is instrumental in such friendships.
We will also interpret "relations" broadly to include friendships, romatic relationships, family relationships,�professional relationships, and unsuccessful or broken relations of various kinds.
To discover possible topics . . .
- Consider how you might extend or possibly even challenge some of our readings. For instance, some of our readings drew samples dominated by young, white, educated Americans. Do similar relationship patterns apply to people of other age cohorts, other ethnic groups, other nationalities, other classes?
- Reflect not just about gender relations but also about people you know and their relations. These people might become useful participants in your research, as interviewees or survey respondents.
To help you recall and think through their relations,
try freewriting as a way to brainstorm possible research topics.
A common challenge for students starting such an assignment with just one relationship in mind is tapping enough details and meaning
from that one relationship to merit an essay. So before writing out a formal
first draft, try freewriting about your chosen type of gender relations as a way to as a way to discover new lines of inquiry into such relations and to think through their significance.
Conducting research
There are two general kinds of academic research: primary and secondary.
- Primary research discovers new knowledge, through ethnographic observations, interviews, surveys, experiments, discourse analysis, etc.
- Secondary research reports someone else's primary research, by summarizing / analyzing�their research found in scholarly books, scholarly journals, scholarly Web sites, etc.
To inquire into your topic, you should conduct primary research, such as ethnographic observations, interviews, a survey, or discourse analysis about a specific aspect of gender relations. Each of our readings draws on primary research to support its observations.
- Tannen, in You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, offers illustrations from many informal interviews and observations, and as well describes the scholarly research of other researchers.
- Monsour, et al., in “Challenges Confronting Cross-Sex Friendships: Much Ado about Nothing?”, surveyed college students.
- Reeder, in �'I Like You . . . As a Friend': The Role of Attraction in Cross-Sex Friendship,� conducted in-depth interviews with both partners in male-female relationships.
- Werking, in “Cross-Sex Friends and 'Marriage Work'.”, offers examples from interviews.
Research enables these authors to test their own attitudes against others' experiences, to discover new ideas, and to support their ideas with evidence.
Your research should similarly seek to test your own initial attitudes against others' experiences, to discover new ideas, and to support your ideas with evidence you can present in your essay.
Chose your research method, your research participants, and your questions carefully;
it can take a lot of work to re-do a survey, for instance, if the first
set of survey questions did not produce informative responses.
Secondary research is not required, though you may find it useful to position your essay in relation to one or more of our readings, extending the reading(s) or challenging the reading(s).
Indeed, if your topic overlaps with the topic of one or more of our readings, you should bring that / those reading(s) into the research "conversation" that you yourself have entered into by discussing and citing that / those reading(s).
Researcher-participant relations
The relations between researchers and participants are themselves the subject of research and considerable controversy. Establish and maintain honest, respectful relations with prospective participants in your research:
- When approaching prospective participants for an ethnographic observation, survey, or interview, explain your research, their potential role in your research, and the procedure of their participation in the observation, survey, or interview.
- Tell them what you will do with your observations or their survey or interview responses (i.e., use those responses in an essay).
- Tell them that your professor may have to know details about their identity, and tell how much confidentiality or anonymity you can otherwise offer them.
- Ask for their consent.
Audience and purpose
The audience for your essay is literally your classmates, your instructor, and other English Department professors.
However, we choose writing in order to communicate to people with whom we cannot speak directly, so you should orient your essay to a broader but literate audience beyond your immediate circle.
Deborah Tannen's work still has a strong national, even international, following, and the research readings
in The Curious Reader were published in scholarly venues with an international readership.
Similarly, imagine writing to people beyond the cultural world we share as members of the LIU community in Brooklyn.
Assume, reasonably, that some of these people would already be inclined to agree with your attitudes about gender relations, but that some would not.
Through your writing, you will want to offer new insight to people who may already be inclined to agree with you, and to maintain the readership of those who don't, perhaps even changing their attitudes about gender relations.
Organizing your essay
Typically, it's best to organize your essay using the common IMRaD format:
- Introduction, in which your introduce and motivate your topic. To motivate your topic, consider positioning your research as an extension or challenge to the research in our readings. As with our Personal Inquiry Essay, it's often best to end your Introduction with a research question.
- Methods, in which you describe your participants and procedures. A good transition from your research question into your methods is, "To answer this question, I conducted [a survey, interviews, etc.]" If you have a long list of survey or interview questions, summarize them and refer us to the appendix for the full list.
- Results, in which you report in detail what your study found. If you have quantitative survey results to report, consider using a table.
- Discussion, in which you interpret and explain the meaning of the results. Often, it is best to combine the Results and Discussion, especially in qualitative studies (observations, interviews, discourse analysis).
Then write a separate Conclusion, in which, recalling how you motivated your topic in the introduction, you could answer your research question by summarizing your Discussion.
Evaluation criteria
Complex thinking, research, and writing cannot be readily reduced to
a mathematical formula. Our syllabus offers general criteria for all course
assignments (see "evaluation criteria"
on the syllabus). Important criteria for this assignment include . . .
- the resourcefulness of your research;
- the development and interpretation of your research results into perspectives that your audience would find credible and significant;
- the organization of your research and perspectives into a cohesive essay.
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