9538	Assessment Initial Draft	Final Draft comments
Abstract	An okay start, but in the final version, it would be a good idea to stress the research and response to previous research more and the general political motivation less.	The abstract does a fair job, but informal and ambiguous expressions detract from it.  For example, calling racial preference patterns "uncomfortable" is not an analytical judgment  and inappropriate in this context.  In the context of the abstract, what it means to say that the unspecified patterns of racial preferences for dating "calls into question the nature of racial equality" is obscure at best.  And, none of this has any direct connection with the project's goal, to examine if the racial composition of occupational categories influences racial preferences for dating.  The abstract should be focused and it should be readily understandable without reading the paper.
Research Question	While the general line of inquiry is very clear and reasonable, the actual research questions remain difficult to decipher.  Try to formulate a clear, summary statement of the research objectives.  The idea of examining variations by occupation is interesting, but does not appear to be the primary objective at this point.	The closest this proposal appears to get to stating a research question is the final sentence of the introduction: "This research utilizes the Yahoo Dating Personals data (N= 6,070) to ultimately explore the possible relationship between the racial composition of people’s occupational fields and their racial exclusions in online dating."  This gives us a general idea what is intended, but the awkward wording and ambiguity is distracting.  Here and throughout, we cannot find specific research questions that clearly represent the apparent intentions of the project, although this may be because the research objectives are still imprecise.  In particular, the mechanisms linking occupations to exposure to people with various racial identities to differential exclusion of potential dating partners by racial identity remain unclear.  Unclear not only causally, but in terms of what each part is supposed to mean.
Literature Review	This is a good start to the literature review.  Consider two concerns for further development.  First, it now reads as a series of brief commentaries on articles that has no apparent logical structure.  Try to find a way to organize these parts into a coherent sequence, that can be explained in an opening paragraph.  Second, where possible and sensible, try to identify other articles that contribute to each of the ideas now highlighted through the summary assessment of one publication - these may be included simply as additional citations without further discussion. Note that, in general, a study of interracial/interethnic marriage (or dating) that does not take into account class and location will appear analytically limited and likely to produce spurious results.  Class and location create strong boundaries for marriage and dating, and racial/ethnic groups are distributed differently by class and location.  Of course, if it appears warranted, the proposal can make an explicit argument that class and location are not significant to the particular dating process and related preferences being studied.  Either way, addressing these influences on mate choice would improve the analysis. The research question stresses occupational categories, but the literature review and theoretical grounding largely neglect occupations.  This should be rectified.	Overall, the effort to pursue alternative explanations in the literature is impressive.  The results, however, come up a bit short.  The discussions of contact theory and social homogamy are the most successful parts of the literature review, because they correctly relate to processes relevant to the research project, i.e., how diversity in an occupation might influence ethnic exclusions in dating.  Unfortunately, most of the remainder is largely irrelevant (despite the strained efforts to make connections).  How much social exchange theory, differential assimilation, or the questionable gendered race ideas might help explain overall patterns of ethnic/racial preferences in dating is unclear, but they appear irrelevant to any possible relationship between occupational composition and dating preferences.  Bronfenbrenner's "theory" was really a framework to remind people that children interact with and are thus influenced by different levels of social organization from their immediate families to the society at large (through culture).  It is difficult to see that this has any bearing on this research project.  The associated piece on "institutionalized spaces" initially appears more relevant, but it is about dating preferences and understandings  within an institution (a college) that develops well-defined cultural ideas about race and dating, and as such offers little apparent conceptual insight to apply to the use of dating sites as influenced by occupations. [Also, the related discussion of sexual racism in the introduction also falls short.  Remember, the logic behind an argument that differential preferences for dating (or sexual attraction) reflect racist hierarchy only gains traction when people show a preference ranking among those "races" that are different from their own and this hierarchy is the same across ethnic/racial groups.  There is little room to apply a racist label to differential ingroup vs. outgroup preferences, beyond perhaps a difference between the degree to which two groups avoid each other.  This discussion, however, neglects these distinctions, and becomes murky and unconvincing as a result.] (For basic background on ingroup preferences, you might look at Mcpherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M Cook. "Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks." Annual Review of Sociology 27, no. 1 (2001): 415-44.)
Data & Analysis	Other than mentioning the data source, the data are only discussed in the lists of items to be used in the Variables section.  The proposal should include a clear description and assessment of the data to be used. The research question focuses on the racial composition of occupations.  The Variables section suggests that racial composition will be measured from the information in the dating data set.  This is a questionable strategy.  Commonly, we would obtain estimates of the composition of occupations using data from the census or bureau of labor.  The proposal should provide a legitimate defense for estimating this from the dating data.	The data seem okay for the project although its limitations should be addressed more directly.  Using the data description from ICPSR is fine, but must be displayed as a quotation and properly cited as with any quotation.  Note that the sampling procedure of choosing the most recently added or edited profiles is a good strategy for getting a representative sample of service users only if the timing of joining the service is random with respect to all relevant criteria, which seems doubtful, (and, of course, it does not produce a representative sample of the target population).
Causal Interpretations	The draft proposal seems to attribute the patterns of differential choice between social groups to their social ranking (actual or perceived).  However, groups that appear socially equal may also tend to practice in-group mate choice.  For example, think about religious distinctions.  Of course, one might argue that each religion considers itself superior, so they are each practicing status exclusion based on different perceptions of status.  How does this apply to racial/ethnic categories?  How do we distinguish the effects of shared or parallel in-group preferences where every group thinks itself better from the effects of a hierarchical distinction ranking groups?  This gets particularly complicated if the groups being considered vary in their understanding of the importance of in-group identity for reasons that have little to do with social hierarchies, e.g. religions that that stress a tribal conception of religious identity requiring in-group marriage compared to those that do not.  The point here is that while it makes sense to expect differential ranking of groups would influence their mate and date preferences, it is problematic to infer that the different social ranking is the only reason group distinctions affect mate and date preferences. Conceptually, the presentation seems to neglect an important, problematic aspect of people's expressed preference patterns on dating sites: they reflect not only what people would like but also what they think feasible.  People commonly avoid asking someone out on a date if they fear they will only be rejected.  We can reasonably expect this also happens on dating sites, implying that people's expressed preferences are to an unknown degree influenced by what they perceive as the preferences of others for people like themselves.  So, if the relevant preference categories were available, we might expect, for example, that working class men would disproportionately rule out women who were both very affluent and very attractive, however much they might feel attracted to such women, because they anticipate they would be rejected.  Consider how this applies to race and the preferences people show on dating sites. What is hypothesis 2???	This research project seems difficult to pull together without some straightforward causal thinking that seems absent - despite the wide ranging discussion of alternative approaches.  The center of the research agenda is the potential influence of variations in the racial composition of occupations.  How could this possibly make a difference?  First, presumably it could determine the amount of contact with people from a racial group, and this contact could either result in increased familiarity and attraction or increased antagonism and distaste.  Second, it might be that different compositions result in different cultural climates, such as racial antagonism or racial harmony that influence participants' attitudes through such things as the cultural milieu,  imitation, and conformity.  Currently the proposal shows little recognition of the need to posit potential causal mechanisms the connect the "independent variable" to the "dependent variable", which seems responsible for some of the general weaknesses. Also, the expectation that occupational ethnic composition could influence ethnic dating preferences seems to depend on several assumptions that are not explored.  One is that people are regularly exposed to others in their occupation in a manner reflecting its composition.  This will be strongly true only in occupations where: (1) the racial composition of the occupation as a whole is proportionately represented in different industries and firms (which is likely to be untrue more often than true) and (2) the organization of work emphasizes interactions with people of the same occupation or occupations with a similar racial compositions, both of which are often not true.  For example, if hair dressers or carpenters are racially diverse but mainly work with other people in their occupation who share their ethnicity, the overall diversity of the occupation does not reflect their work experience.  Analogously, people in racially homogenous occupations, may spend most of their work days interacting with a racially diverse range of people.  The causal argument needs to respond to this.  Hypothesis 2 appears simply to be that Hypothesis 1 is wrong; as such it is not a separate hypothesis.
Research Contribution	The current draft does not directly present the research value of the proposed project, although this gets some indirect attention, particularly in the introduction.  This should appear in the final version, stressing how the proposed project will expand on existing knowledge.	The research significance section neglects how the proposed research will add to existing knowledge, which is the key question.  The suggestion that knowing about racial exclusion in dating will give us greater insight into racism is not convincing, however interesting these exclusion processes might be.  This would only become likely if the pattern of sexual/dating preferences differed from other patterns of racism, for example if some group otherwise denigrated were desired as mates.  Also, the effort to relate a study of dating preferences to concerns with the incarceration of  Black Americans seems strained at best.
Citations & Bibliography	The referencing seems fine.	References are largely fine.  Quotations, however, must reference the specific pages from which the quotation is derived; this proposal includes numerous quotations, none of which has a proper citation.  The Merton 1941 citation in the literature review and the citations of the studies described in the “Methodology” section should be fixed.
Quality of Writing & Organization	The writing is clear and easy to read.  The absence of some parts stands out, of course.	Well written.
Priorities for Revising / Responsiveness to Feedback	The proposal seems to be developing well.  Among other things, you want to work on clarifying the research question, providing a good account of the data, revising the literature review into a better argumentative structure, and developing more nuanced, focused explanatory alternatives.	The proposal makes an effort to respond to much of the feedback received.  The effectiveness of this effort is variable.
Miscellaneous Notes
Proposal		This proposal is a mixed bag that is hard to categorize.  It suffers from using data of questionable adequacy to pursue a research finding that seems unlikely to be true, and that would be difficult to show true supposing it is true even with really good data.  This seems to have produce analytical flailing in varied places as discussed above.
Class Overall		The solid effort to move forward through the class seems to have been held back by commitment to a difficult project.