For your draft, you need to hit the specified minimums for the first draft (if y

For your draft, you need to hit the specified minimums for the first draft (if you go beyond this, that is totally fine, and I HIGHLY recommend it, but these are here to give Monica and myself a substantive amount of material to supply you with the necessary feedback).
Your final paper serves as a culmination of what we’ve been covering throughout this course. It is aimed at pushing you to position yourself as a social scientist, conceptualizing, approaching, and proposing a topic of interest to you.
Minimums for First Draft:
Minimum of six full pages of text.
A fully fleshed out Introduction
The foundational aspects of the literature review
Here, work out the possible subsections
You should aim to have 6 of your sources included in the paper at this point.
Beginnings of a conclusion
Must include the references/bibliography/works cited page!
The full final paper needs to be formatted in the following manner/contain the following requisite support:
Size 12 Times New Roman font
Minimum 12 pages of content (a full 12 pages of content)
1” margins all around
Double-spaced
A uniformly applied citation method (both in-text and in the references list)
You can use ASA, APA, MLA, etc.
A minimum of 13 resources
11 of these resources must be from academic peer-reviewed resources
2 of these resources must come from a non-academic (though trustworthy) resource. These are especially useful for your introduction
To that end, the Research Paper contains the following, required items:
Introduction
Literature Review
Conclusion
References (this is not included in the 12 page minimum)
Each of these components break down as follows:
Introduction
The introduction will serve to introduce the topic and idea to your audience (i.e. me). In this case, you need to construct an introduction that motivates an interest in the topic as well as introduces the basic necessities of understanding to your reader. To that end, your introduction should focus primarily on your issue of interest (the pay gap, for example).
Make sure there is a clear thesis of what your overall paper is as well as the research question you’re attempting to answer.
It should give some insight into the components that underlie that issue (define it, give a bit of history on it, and also present basic statistics for it, which you can obtain through places like newspaper articles or research organizations like Pew).
Remember: the introduction motivates the reader to want to know more, so it needs to stay focused on the issue that you want to address. If you have an annual review article, it can give you some great basic details for your introduction.
Literature Review
For your literature review, you must use a minimum of 11 peer-reviewed, academic research articles. The literature review serves to fine tune your point further and helps you to focus on where you are most specifically interested, namely the key concepts, factors, and variables that you think influence the problem you are trying to understand.
You need to work through your idea here about what you identify as happening. This works to take what you’re interested in and give insight into how it’s complex. So, make sure your literature review discusses what influences you’re interested.
For example, say you were interested in the voting behaviors of people. Your literature review would note what influences people to vote and why. So, you’d most likely have some discussion of how and why race influences voter preference, as well as some discussion of some things like gender, income, etc. That way your reader understands the complexity of the issue, but keep in mind your major focus.
For this section, you′re welcome to break it down into subsections. For example, if you′re doing a study of food consumption patterns and the changing nature of diets being influenced by pop culture, you could have subsections regarding vegetarianism/veganism, gluten-free, paleo, etc. (Or, if you′re more interested in how food trends are mediated by demographics, you could use subsections like Racial Variation in Food Consumption, Gendered Nature of Food Consumption, etc.)
Conclusion
The conclusion reiterates your main research question and really offers the moment that you can fully make sure that everything brought home, as it were. You′re not merely reiterating exactly what you just said. Rather, you′re using it to make sure your reader understands the full ideas and implications. You should also articulate what it doesn′t address and that future papers can integrate to understand the topic more fully.
References
In addition to using in-text citations, you must also have a references list. Use whichever citation method you want but it must be uniform!