41 Where in an article to find the deets on sampling

Where in an article to find the deets on sampling

Ok, real talk. I spent most of my undergrad and, ahem, possibly a large portion of my graduate school years hating style. It’s so arbitrary. It’s so tedious. It’s such a pain in the…neck. But over the years I’ve come to very much appreciate the conventions of Writing Style. Yes, this is probably because I grew to “speak” APA like a second language (until each time they updated the manual…which I low-key think is to prop up APA funding^[1].) Style, be it MLA, APA, Chicago, you name it, tells researchers exactly where to PUT stuff, so on the flip side it tells you (the reader, the Should You Believe It — um — Er) where to FIND it. And this is important because I could fill your brains with all the best research methods knowledge in the universe… but if you can’t find the sampling strategy the research employed in the primary research to assess it…what difference does it make? (Unless of course you go on to graduate school but really, I can’t tell you how often I read that students don’t need a methods course because they don’t plan to go to graduate school.) Thus, understanding sampling is one part of the Competent Consumer Creation puzzle — and knowing where to find said strategy is the other!

So, let’s begin.

I started this chapter talking about style and yes, there is a reason (whew! right?). As always, we’re going to defer to APA because it is the style most often required of SS communication researchers for their publications.

Now, first, APA did recently drop a style change on us – from 6 to 7. Generally these

style changes make me absolutely bananas because I have to re-learn major elements of my research language but this set is pretty sweet. It includes mechanisms to reduce bias in language for one (and a lot of these changes are gonna show up in the methods section, which is where you’re gonna find the sampling strategy — OR LACK THEREOF — but we’ll get to that). Another thing NOT related to sampling per say but must be said because it makes all of our lives easier is that we no longer have to list all the authors (up to 6) on the FIRST citation and each subsequent citation is et al., we leave the gate with 3 or more peeps starting at 1st author et al..

APA tells authors EXACTLY where to put their sampling methods. And that would be in the procedure section. We saw some of this in the video lecture in Unit 8 about article navigation. As you saw in this video, there can be a good degree of variation across studies, even if you’re looking at articles published in the same journal, and a specialty targeted journal at that (we looked at Health Communication – linked here but remember that for the video I accessed it through the library, which conveniently provides ya’ll with full-text access). The good news is that even if the subsections are all named the exact same thing you’ll be hard pressed to find a methods section without subsections identified.