Brief Assignment 3

As we discussed in class, this week our assignment is about theoretical frameworks of a text. Another word we used to describe this concept is warrants. Keep our discussions about the movie review, commonplaces, and the two sociology articles discussed in class in mind when you work on this assignment.

Objective: demonstrate your ability to determine the theoretical framework/network of interpretation of a text.

Description: Because of the complexity of human relationships, sociologists are careful to detail the theoretical framework of their research. By doing so, they articulate the underlying premises and assumptions that shape their claims. Not all researchers make this theoretical framework as obvious as sociologists do, nor do they label it as a “theoretical framework.” You may hear the terms “commonplaces,” “ideology,” “underlying assumptions,” or “warrants,” all of which refer to similar concepts or beliefs that underlie a writer’s work.

Your task for this assignment is to identify the theoretical framework of a piece of academic scholarship (see below for selections).

1. Read the piece carefully and describe as specifically as possible what it is that the researcher is curious about. You may find it helpful to formulate this as a research question or a hypothesis.
2. Once you have identified the question(s) that the writer is trying to answer, you will need to determine the theoretical framework: how the writer views the world and what kind of knowledge the writer values. (You might want to review the discussion of ideology and commonplaces beginning on page 191 of the text since a theoretical framework will be based on an ideology and commonplaces.) You may need to do some careful analysis here since the researcher may have left the theoretical framework somewhat or nearly completely unstated.

Your essay should be 300-500 words. For this assignment, use one of the following texts:
• Psychology: “Focused Expressive Writing as Self-Help for Stress and Trauma” (457- 465)
• Political Science: “Iraq and the Democratic Peace: Who Says Democracies Don’t Fight?” (505 – 509)
• Chemistry: “Realms of the Spring” (573 – 576)


REMEMBER TO READ FOR THIS WEEK:
Chapter 7 (pages 207-35)