The Session Long Project for our course is going to give you the opportunity to prepare a professional paper addressing an issue within the field of Psychology. This SLP assignment will enhance your ability to locate, assimilate, and critically assess information from existing published literature in order to answer a specific research question or set of related questions. Your final Session Long Project (with all revisions) is due at the end of module 4.
Your topic for this paper should focus on one of these specific research questions:
What do we know about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)? What psychological symptoms are associated with it, and what effective treatments exist today (if any) to manage those symptoms?
For this first assignment, you will peruse the related literature addressing the issue that interests you. You don’t have to read all the sources in detail—some of them may be fairly long documents detailing specific research studies that were conducted, while others may be lengthy literature reviews summarizing the work that’s been done in this area.
The goal here is to familiarize yourself with approximately 5 to 10 good resources that you know you can use to write your paper.
Toward this end, be sure to access ProQuest and/or EBSCO via the background readings page. If you would like to look at papers and research studies written by academics you can use select “peer-reviewed/scholarly journals only” as well as “full text/articles only” options. However, there are many professional papers and other types of documents that may also be quite valuable to you even if they are not peer reviewed or based on empirical research. Regardless of the type of papers and documents you use, you will want to use them critically. Do they make sense? Are they biased in one way or another? Do you have doubts about their findings or conclusions?
Finally, remember, for the research to be considered “current” it must have been published within the past 1-5 years. You may find some “classic” papers and documents that are very helpful, and you are welcome to use some of those, but if you plan on using only five or six references in your paper, they should all be relatively new. In the field of psychology things change so quickly that a paper on a topic like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that was written ten years ago may be woefully outdated.
Clearly state which issue you have chosen for the course.