Outdoor physical activity improved mental health status of adults with clinical depression
First page essay instruction:
During this semester, you have spent a significant amount of time developing, refining, and narrowing a research
question. According to Comer (pp. 91-94), effective research questions:
• Originate from a disciplinary context (take into account prior disciplinary knowledge)
• Maintain significance (to a subset of people)
• Keep a pointed scope (they are manageable and part of a larger question)
• Spur further research (they have multiple branches of inquiry leading to and from them)
Describe how your most current research question (as stated in the literature review) fulfills each of the
characteristics described above. How does your research question fit within a specific discourse community? How
is it significant for a specific audience, but also manageable enough to be addressed within the constraints of the
proposal? How might your question spur additional questions? What other avenues of research were left
unexplored but might be viable research questions for your area of inquiry? Provide specific examples of how your
research question meets/does not meet the characteristics above.
As you write the advocacy letter, how is that new audience engaged (the caregiver of Care Old People Home) with
your research question? How does that audience contribute, make a decision, or influence what happens next to
the research question and to the arguments you made in the literature review?
Second page : Aim for 350 words.
In this forum, you will focus on your literature review and advocacy letter as you answer the questions
below. Please include specific examples from your own work.
1. In a sentence or two, describe the key argument(s) and audience(s) of your literature review and
of your advocacy letter.
2. Describe how your research question changed over time (you may refer to the online activities
that directly addressed narrowing the research question). Specifically, if you were re-doing the
“Articulating the research question” activity, how would it be different? Why did it change? How
did it change? What decisions did you make as you developed a narrow focus? Be specific and
use concrete examples.
3. Briefly describe 2-3 tasks you completed as you used some of the research you found while
writing the literature review to write the advocacy letter. What steps did you take to shift the
emphasis towards a new audience and while using a different genre? What has worked well?
What has been a challenge? How have you addressed this challenge?
4. What skills learned as you gathered sources, narrowed the focus of the project, and synthesized
sources might be useful in other contexts (other academic courses, non-academic settings)? How
do you think the content you gathered during the semester might be useful in the future? What
tactics and strategies or what content knowledge might you be able to use in a different setting?
5. Provide feedback to at least two other classmates. Focus on common problems and different
approaches to problem solving. Be specific.