Now let's talk about the introduction section of an article.

The introduction section includes a literature review, significance of the problem, theoretical framework, and the research questions or problem statement. In the literature review in the introduction section, it will introduce a new topic. It will tell you what's known, including statistics, what other recent research published articles on that topic, and what is not known. It will also tell you about the gaps in the literature. It really is trying to provide information about why the study needs to be done. In the introduction section, where you're reading about this new topic, you will learn about the literature in terms of awakening your interest. The writer of this article, the researcher themselves, is trying to sparken your interest in this article, and tell you that this is a very important subject. They should provide a summary, or an overview, of the key topic. Again they should be explaining what's known and what's not known. What is new. What's important about the study. The literature itself should support the need to address the research questions, problems, or hypotheses. So what is the content of a literature review? It really should inc-, include things that are the published, that is publishing articles on a broad area. It might include the theory, it might include information about the methods. It should include, the most recent literature, and also historical literature. They should have some primary references about the key ideas and the first people who did research in that area. So what's the difference between a primary source and a secondary source? The primary source, the primary articles that should be cited, are empirical studies and quantitative research. It might be, on a theory, it might be about the actual

person who developed the theory, and the first article that talks about it. For secondary source, it might be a literature review of, that has an overview of many different articles, or it might be a second article that came out after the first, and refers to the first one. It might be an article that has more about a discussion or critique of a theory or an idea. So to give an example here, in Dr. Lee and Gay's article about the bedroom environments, their literature review included the introduction and as I mentioned, it didn't have subsections. But the topics that it covered was about sleep of new parents. What they talk about is a major area of concern was sleep disruptions in the postpartum period. The reviewed historical and recent literature. They talked about articles that were published in 1992 up until 2009. They included the background on methods, and variables of interest. For example, they talked about sleep disruption is associated with diminished well-being, depressed mood, poor role adjustment, and exhaustion. They also talked about first-time mothers, and that they're at the highest risk for poor sleep. They then talked about interventions, are usually targeting infants but not parents. So all of this information is really providing evidence for what's known and what's not known, and taking us to really understand why they needed to do this research study. Another example is Dr. Ward's article published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology. Here, her literature review also included no sections, but when you break it down you could really find different components that are really important to the background. The specific topic was about describing daytime naps and nighttime sleep-wake patterns in children in child care. The broad area of concern and topic that she was covering was to talk about sleep-wake patterns.

She included the historical and the recent literature, going back as far as 1968, including 1984, and up until the present at the time of that article. She included information about the background on methods and variables of interest. What she stated was, there were few studies on the objective sleep-wake patterns in preschoolers. She also talked about 60% of children today attend childcare. And she said that children who nap, have less nighttime sleep and earlier morning rise, rise time. So all of this information that you provided in the introduction again, would lead us to understanding why she developed the research questions she did. The question for you is, what are the key components of the introduction section of an article? A, to identify what is known and not known on the subject. B, to summarize the literature and key authors on the subject. C, to identify the study purpose and research questions. The answer is A, to identify what is known and not known on the subject.