REGISTRATION AND GUIDELINES

Guidelines: Your presentation should be between 12-15 minutes in length. When preparing your presentation, please keep in mind that many in the audience may not be familiar with your paper topic - therefore please try to minimize the use of technical terms and briefly describe the theories/statistical techniques you employ. Also, we suggest that you do not read your paper verbatim, but rather work from an outline or script. Further, we suggest that your practice your presentation in advance - paying special note to the 15 minute time limit (which will be strictly enforced). One common model for organizing presentations is described below - although you are of course free to organize your presentation in whatever manner you like:

1. Introduce your paper by stating your research question(s) clearly.
2. Explain to the audience why providing an answer to this question is important (e.g., does your research have implications for policy makers, for society as large?).
3. Briefly describe the answers that other researchers have provided to your research question (i.e., briefly review the literature on your research question).
4. Explain how you went about answering your research question (e.g., library research, analyzing data others have collected, collecting your own data). Briefly note any strengths and weaknesses of your approach.
5. If your paper involves the analysis of data, briefly describe the methods used to analyze such data.
6. Describe your major findings. (Feel free to prepare handouts for distribution to the audience - prepare about 30 copies).
7. Conclude by describing the contribution your paper makes to the literature and/or larger community.