Introduction: This is a brief discussion of the overview of your research design paper—the purpose, content, and importance of your research design paper. In addition, in this section you briefly lay out the other sections of the paper (the content as previously mentioned). Literature Review: In this section, you provide a discussion of the literature that is the basis of your research. You must have at least six academic journal articles or texts. Please contact me if you have any questions regarding whether or not a journal is an academic journal. This critique/discussion section discusses previous research in your subject area. In addition, you must note what questions the previous research did not answered. Research Question(s): In this section, you clearly and concisely discuss the research question or questions that your paper addresses. Please provide an in-depth discussion of the research question(s) and the reasons why these questions are important. The following is a sample research question: What affects the urban development policies of cities? You could simplify the previous question by asking: What affects urban development policies? Hypothesis (Hypotheses): In this section, you clearly and concisely lay out your hypothesis or hypotheses. A hypothesis is an educated guess about the relationship between two variables (the independent variable, or X, and the dependent variable, known as Y). You must plainly state what the independent (X) and dependent variables (Y) are and concisely denote how you think these variables are related and to what degree—direct, inverse, random, etc. (if possible). You must provide a logical reason why each variable is included in your model—usually the reason is previous research has used the hypothesis or a variation. Methodology: In this section of your research design paper, you must clearly and concisely layout the quantitative methods you use to test your hypothesis (hypotheses). In this discussion, you must provide the reader a reiteration of your variables (how you conceptualized and operationalized—measured the variables) and why they are included in your model. You clearly and concisely discuss how you address issues of validity—particularly internal and external validity and the threats to each of these types of validity—as well as reliability. You will note the good points of the methodology you chose to test your hypothesis (hypotheses) as well as the weak points of your methodology. Findings and Analysis: In this section, you will not actually collect data and run measures of association and statistical significance. However, you must provide me with a short summation of what you expect to find if you had collected the data and ran your measures of association and tests of statistical significance. Conclusion: In this section, summarize each of the previous sections clearly and concisely ensuring that you recap your research including the purpose, content, and importance of the paper. Finally, ensure that you leave your reader with directions for future research and, most importantly, with future research questions. References: In this section, you list the references that you cite in your paper (remember, you must have at least six references—counting your course text). You must use either the APA method (The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association) or the APSA (Style Manual for Political Science, published by the American Political Science Association) for cites in your paper and in your reference section. In the discipline of political science, which public administration is a subfield, we use parenthetical cites within our research papers.