Choose a journal article from your subject area. Examine it using the following - Essay Example

This student also expected that Churchill devoted many of his speeches on foreign affairs more than Gladstone, since the former lived during the times of two world wars and other wars. The startling results are that both Churchill and Gladstone devoted majority of their speeches on domestic affairs and that Churchill gave less Parliamentary speeches than Gladstone. Apparently, the media does not project Churchill as a domestic statesman. This essay aims to review the strengths and weaknesses of the methods and sources of data of this article, using several respectable books on political and social science research.

The methodology for Meisel’s (2000) research is quantitative. He rejected rhetorical analysis because of his research goals that emphasise learning through the numbers. He believed that numbers could provide greater information on “the overall patterns and underlying structures of Gladstones and Churchills speech-making” (263). To examine Gladstone’s speeches, Meisel (2000) used Arthur Tilney Bassett’s index of speeches. Bassetts index included the date, place and subject of almost all of Gladstones acknowledged speeches inside and outside parliament (Meisel, 2000: 271).

For Churchill, similar categories of information can be obtained from Churchills Complete Speeches and Robert Rhodes James’s collection of Churchill’s speeches. After that, Meisel (2000) examined the individual speech productivity of these statesmen, before he compared and contrasted the speech content and locations of Churchill’s and Gladstone’s speeches. The strengths of the quantitative methodology are ability to provide accurate measures of productivity for comparison purposes, and statistics could be compared to deduce changing political directions and events.

The sources of this article were able to provide information about the