Instructions PS373: CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS ASSIGNMENT 1: RELATIONSHIP SCIENCE IN THE POPULAR MEDIA In Assignment 1, you will apply what you have learned about research methods to better understand and interpret scientific research in close relationships. You will also develop skills in critically evaluating how science is portrayed in the popular media. Science in close relationships is often appealing to the general public. As a result, the popular press often reports on findings that appear in academic journals. However, they do not always do so accurately. These reports are often written by (and for) people who have limited experience in understanding academic research and also have constraints on how much they are able to write. Consequently, these sources may sometimes report research findings inaccurately, or simplify them such that they misrepresent what the original authors actually found. This assignment asks you to critique how well a given journal article is represented in a non-academic source. This assignment asks you to find an article from a popular media that discusses a recent scientific finding in the field of close relationships. You may find this in newspapers (e.g., The Toronto Star), magazines (e.g., Cosmopolitan, Maxim), or on the internet (e.g., blogs). Once you have your article, you must find the original academic journal publication that this article is based on (or the main paper being discussed, if your popular article talks about multiple pieces of research). You will then summarize the popular article's description of the research, and then critically evaluate how this description fits with the source article. Your paper should contain the following sections. 1. Citation for popular article 2. Citation for original source article 3. Discuss how the popular article describes the research. What are the main findings that are being reported? 4. Discuss how the original article describes the research. What are the authors' actual findings? (Note that you should read the original article before starting your paper to ensure you understand the findings and the statistical tests that were used. If you do not understand the results of the original study, you will not be able to do well on this assignment) Compare and contrast how the two sources are similar in their depiction of the results, and how they might differ. What did the author of the popular article "get right" about the research findings? What did he/she/they "get wrong"? What is your conclusion regarding how accurately the results were represented? Should the original authors of the journal article be disappointed in how their research was portrayed? If you were an author for a popular magazine, what would you have done differently (if anything) to be more 'true' to the actual findings? This paper should be a maximum of 2 double spaced pages and formatted in APA style.