Purpose:
The purpose of this paper assignment is to introduce you to current research investigating the relation of communication and health care and to indicate its value to all health care professionals.
Description:
Papers will consist of two parts. The first part will be a summary of the findings of an academic, peer-reviewed research article in an American or European journal that reports the results of the authors’primary research into some aspect of communication and health care. (Please note that this excludes articles that advocate for some approach to something like conflict based on the findings of studies done by other people.
Also, please note that you may have to describe the author(s)’s research method in order for the findings to make sense.) The second part of the paper is an argument about the value of your article’s findings to health care professionals. It should be an answer to a question like: Would knowledge of the author’s findings help a health care professional to better understand specific aspects of interpersonal communication in health care settings?
Would it help an HCP to predict the results of certain kinds of interpersonal actions? (Note: Your argument has to be specific. It is not acceptable to simply argue that the article will help health care professionals realize the importance of interpersonal communication to the delivery of health care. That could be said of any study.)
(If you do not have much experience performing or observing health care work and so find it difficult to support your claim using first-hand experiences or observations, then you may have to speculate about the value of your article’s findings based on what you think health care work involves or what others have told you about it. A better alternative would be to interview someone who does work or has worked in health care.)
Technical requirements: Your paper must have a separate title page and works cited page. You do not need to write anything other than those two pages and the body of your paper. (Thus, for instance, you do not need to write an abstract.) You do not need to read any article other than the one you have selected to write this paper, so there is no need to cite other works in-text or at the end. However, if you do read and use others, you must follow MLA or APA style in writing in-text and works cited/references citations. In any case, the first time you cite your article in your paper you must use proper MLA or APA form. After that, if you only cite your article, then you only have to cite page numbers when quoting your article or using its author(s)’s ideas. The body of your paper (i.e., everything aside from your title page and works cited page) must be at least two full pages long, double-spaced, paginated and written using Times New Roman, 12 point font. You do not have to include running titles, etc. as MLA and/or APA require of papers for publication.
WARNING:
For this assignment, a research article is not an article that involves research of the kind that you do for many of your classes. For many of your classes, when you are asked to do research for a paper, your instructor wants you to go the library, find a number of articles, books, etc. about some topic, and then use or quote the ideas of the authors of those sources to make a particular point. But you are not looking for a paper in which the author does (only) that.
For this paper, a “research article” is not one that makes some kind of point (like, health care professionals should adopt the XYZ method of resolving conflict.) Further, it is one that does report the results of the author’s observations about or measurements of actual interpersonal communication behavior. In other words, it describes what the author actually, directly saw or measured when looking at the behavior of a specific group of people.