What is a scholarly journal article?
How do you make a decision about whether or not something is scholarly or academic? How do you distinguish between an academic journal and a popular magazine?

Take a look at the following 2 paragraphs and make a decision about whether or not these came from a scholarly journal or a popular magazine.
Write down, on a piece of paper, three things about each paragraph which led to your decision.

 

Paragraph 1:

"Infante, Trebing, Sheperd, and Seeds (1984) identified four main causes of verbal aggression, including psychopathology, disdain for the receiver of the verbal aggression, social learning, and an argumentative skill deficiency. The argumentative skill deficiency model (Infante et al., 1989) proposes that individuals resort to verbal aggression because they lack the argumentation skills for dealing with conflict constructively. According to this model, when unskilled arguers' ideas are attacked, they feel a need to defend themselves, but do not have the necessary skills. Therefore, they mount a defense of the object closest to their position on the issue-themselves (Infante, 1987). In doing so, unskilled arguers perceive their conversational partners' attacks on positions as attacks on themselves, leading the unskilled arguers to feel justified in introducing verbal aggression into the conversation. Due to the norm of reciprocity that appears to operate in aggressive communication (Infante, 1988), the conversational partner responds with verbal aggression. In short, unskilled arguers may incite others to engage in verbal aggression, thus heightening the level of negative arousal (Infante et al., 1989). According to Wigley (1998), current research seems to provide substantial evidence that the argumentative skill deficiency explanation and social learning are the two main causes of verbal aggression."1
Paragraph 2:

" Twelve-year-old Jamie Lee was thrilled to be selected for his town's hockey rep team. Sure his dad was assistant coach, but Jamie went through the same tryouts as everyone else. He was excited and proud until one of his teammates, who was also a classmate, began to pick on him. "You don't deserve to be on the team," the boy said. "You only got on because your dad's a coach." When he got other kids to join in, Jamie really began to doubt his ability to play. Every time he made an error on the ice, he felt worse.
When Jamie wore his rep team hockey shirt to school one day, that same teammate started the taunting again. "You have no right to wear that shirt to school," he told Jamie. Crushed, Jamie never wore his rep team shirt to class again. He's 20 now, but those memories are still painful. For most people, the word "bully" conjures up images of one kid punching another when no adults are looking. But a lot of preteen bullying happens with words rather than fists. And, says Debra Pepler of the LaMarsh Centre for Research on Violence and Conflict Resolution at York University in Toronto, "contrary to what people often believe, boys bully this way almost as often as girls."
Pepler's 2003 research found that about 40 percent of grade-six girls were involved in some kind of "social bullying," including using hurtful or insulting words, telling rumours or deliberately ignoring a child. By grade nine, 65 percent of boys and 75 percent of girls had bullied kids in these ways. What does this verbal aggression look like? "Generally, it is comments aimed at the child's areas of vulnerability," says Pepler. "The bully may poke fun at the child's appearance, intelligence, grades, clothes, family, racial background, sexuality or sexual orientation - anything that a child might be sensitive about. Bullying is about power, so the goal is to destabilize and distress the victim - that's what gives the bully a sense of power."2

 
 
© 2006, Kate Pitcher
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 Chory-Assad, R.M. (2004). Effects of television sitcom exposure on the accessibility of verbally aggressive thoughts. Western Journal of Communication, 68, 431-454. Retrieved November 16, 2006, from ProQuest Research Library database. 
2 Pitman, T. (2006). 12 to 14 years: bullying with words. Today's Parent, 23, 130-132. Retrieved November 16, 2006, from ProQuest Research Library database.