Description
PSY 270 Mental Health Issues Paper
Final Project
OVERVIEW
Over the course of the semester, you learned about the complexities of gender-related experiences and expectations. Most of the content covered in this course is not available or accessible to people outside of academia. Are there any topics that you wanted to share with others as you learned about them? Are there any issues of inequity, inequality, or exclusion that you would like to see changed? For this project, you are encouraged to build upon your awareness of gender cognition, identity, expression, and experience to act as an agent of social change. What does that mean? Consider the ways in which you could raise awareness about gender-related social issues or create social change to increase inclusion and equity. For this assignment, you will develop a project applying the concepts from across the modules to a current social issue related to gender.
Course objectives covered in this project include CO 1, CO 5
GENERAL PLAN
Drawing upon Fine and Barreras’s call for psychologists “to be of use” (see Module 6 Study Materials), focus on the development of a proposed community project, an awareness campaign, a policy proposal, an educational tool, a research proposal, or any other project that would alleviate a social issue related to gender inequity or a specific gender-related health or mental health issue. This final project builds upon the application exercise in Module 4, where you were encouraged to explore organizations, policies, and programs related to gender-based social and health-related issues.
You might choose to build upon an existing program, policy, awareness campaign, or educational tool, or you might develop something new.
Include the following in your project:
- Cover page
- Literature review providing your rationale for the project (2 to 3 pages)
- Once you determine your topic of interest, use the library electronic database to conduct some research and locate peer-reviewed articles in PSYCHINFO. Under advanced search, enter terms related to your topic of interest. Choose two to three articles related to your topic or to a specific method of raising awareness (e.g., psychoeducation plan).
- Write a brief introductory paragraph describing your topic of interest. Summarize the content in the articles you found via PSYCHINFO. Discuss how the research you explored in your review relates to your own proposal.
- You may find Purdue OWL’s site aboutWriting a Literature Review to be helpful.
- Project proposal (1 to 2 pages)
- In Module 4, you researched ways in which organizations, institutions, and individuals have provided recommendations for or enacted social change. In this section, you should expand upon your proposed plan to share psychological information with a non-academic audience.
- Include your suggested audience (e.g., human resources professionals, high school students, law enforcement officers). Describe the content you would include in your proposed project (e.g., training workshop), but you do not need to fully develop the project. Explain how your proposed project or plan would lessen or alleviate gender-based disparities or provide consciousness-raising opportunities for your proposed audience.
- References page
- In addition to the two to three articles located in PSYCHINFO, you might choose to reference websites, videos, or textbook content. Your final paper should include at least four references to peer-reviewed articles, websites, videos, or the textbook. All references (i.e., citations) should be formatted in APA Style.
WRITING AND RESEARCH RESOURCES
The following links provide online writing and research aids to help you with your paper assignments.
- OWL (Online Writing Lab) at Purdue University
- Writer’s Handbook, the Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
- APA Style Guidelines
- Information Literacy for TESU Students (an online guide from the New Jersey State Library to assist you in starting your research, searching databases for articles, citing sources, using ILLiad to request books or articles, etc.)
