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Writing A Qualitative Paper

Decent Essays

Introduction Leisure sciences is a field that takes its writing requirements from other fields such as kinesiology, physical education or the social sciences. Depending on your topic, you may write a scientific paper or a qualitative paper; this paper will focus on qualitative methods. For the purpose of this article the focus will be on social science research with physical educational research. When writing in leisure sciences, it is important to take notes from both disciplines, for example Oliver (1998) wrote that physical educational research uses narratives to describe how professionals work. This is important in leisure sciences as the field is a professional field and can be related as both fields focus on research that involves knowledge …show more content…

Academic writing is not artistic, it is not something that a researcher can just write and claim it is true, the writer needs to prove they have authority or that others with authority agree with their claim (Lewin, 2010). MacDonald (2010) points out that although there is evidence that supports your claim, you cannot claim it as “truth”, for example in your literature review you may find two articles on the same topic claiming different theories. This is why when providing evidence it is important to word the research in a way that claims your authority, however it also does not claim truth but the support means that your research is more likely to be true, phrases that can be used are “research suggests that” or “findings indicate that” (MacDonald, 2010). Phrasing work like this proves that you have evidence to back up your claims, but also lets the reader know you are leaving room for interpretation of the …show more content…

When claiming authority over a topic or theory, it is important that you prove you know what you’re talking about because research backs it up, this can be the differences between “I know because research proved it” versus “I just know” (Locke, 1989). This is what makes the literature review one of the most important and longest pieces of an academic paper. According to Lewin (2010) the literature is required in academic writing as it provides a support and a background. However, issues do arise in academic writing with the literature review. When writing an academic paper, the writer needs to not only reference other academic articles, in social sciences the writer needs to reference the creator of original theories that may be in papers they are citing, and they also need to reference the original source of information they are using to back up their claims (Lewin, 2010). Without this citation, the information is not validated. An example of this is in therapeutic recreation the selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) model is referenced by a number of articles in the Therapeutic Recreation Journal (2016), however each author must give the credit to the creator, Baltes (1998). If this is not done in academic writing, it not only does not give credit to the creator, it also shows that the author of the article is not knowledgeable on

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