Research Assignment for PSY 150 05x and 07x If you were going to write a research paper in psychology, how would you do your research? The purpose of this assignment is to familiarize you with PsycINFO one of the major online resources that can help you investigate topics in the field of psychology. You ll use PsycINFO to locate articles and books on a subject you choose. You will then evaluate these sources and choose five summaries (called abstracts ) to explain and turn in. Completing all of the steps below will assure you of full credit. If you do not complete these steps, you will certainly lose points so you may want to use this as a checklist: 1. Choose any topic in psychology that interests you. It does not need to be something we are studying this semester. You could choose treatment of depression in teenagers, or the psychology of serial killers, or advertising and persuasion, or the history of post-traumatic stress disorder, or hypnosis for quitting smoking... any psychology topic that interests you. Pick a topic that s specific enough that you could actually write a research paper about it if you were asked to. For example, schizophrenia is far too broad a topic, while cognitive therapy for schizophrenia is focused enough. L 2. Type your topic proposal, and a simple outline of what your research paper would include (if you were actually going to write a research paper, which you aren t). This should be very basic. You needn t include sources or detailed descriptions just your topic, and what you would include in a term paper about it. Turn in your topic choice and outline by the beginning of class on Monday, October 20 th. 3. Log into the PsycINFO database, and familiarize yourself with how to use it. (To do this, you ll start at the NCLIVE web site, http://www.nclive.org, and then follow the directions that start on page 3 of this packet to get to PsycINFO. Note that if you are using an older version of the America Online browser, you may not be able to get to NCLIVE). 4. Use PsycINFO to conduct a search for journal articles and books related to your topic. Find five sources that would be useful to you if you were really going to write a research paper. This means that the sources should be fairly up-to-date, in a language you can read, and that you can understand, from reading the summary, what the author is talking about. That last one is very important, because if you can t write a few sentences about a source in your own words for me, I am unlikely to give you credit for it. 5. When you ve found five sources (such as articles, books, or chapters in books) that would be useful if you were really writing a research paper, print out the references, including the summaries (called abstracts ). L 6. Type a seven paragraph essay. In the first paragraph, tell me what your topic is, and why you chose it. Then write one paragraph for each of the five sources that you chose (paragraphs two through six). For each source, summarize what the abstract tells you, in your own words, so that I am sure you understand it, and tell how this article would contribute to your research paper if you were actually writing one. Finish with a seventh, concluding, paragraph. Do not skimp on any of the seven paragraphs! L 7. Turn in your essay and the five references you printed out, including the abstracts, by Friday, November 14 th, at the beginning of class. As usual, I encourage you to turn the assignment in early.
Research Assignment - Page 2 Hints for doing a good job with this assignment Your topic outline can be brief. Simply state your overall topic, and then a list of the subjects you d include if you were really writing a research paper. Here are two examples: Example #1 I would like to write a research paper on depression in teenagers in the United States. I m interested in whether teenage depression is increasing, and in whether depression occurs more frequently among some racial or ethnic groups than among others. My paper would also cover how depression is diagnosed in teenagers. What are the symptoms? Are they different in teenagers than they are in adults? Example #2 Topic: Depression in U.S. Teenagers I. Causes and risk factors for teenage depression. A. Genetic factors B. Environmental factors II. Treatments A. Medications 1. Effectiveness 2. Side effects B. Psychotherapy 1. Which kinds are most effective? 2. Are there problems or side effects? Note that while the examples above share the same overall topic, they include some very different subjects. You want to be specific about what you would cover. Although the five sources you select using PsycINFO do not need to cover every area of your outline, all five of them must be relevant to some part of it. Don t select sources that don t relate to your topic! You may only use PsycINFO for this assignment. If you simply use a search engine (like Google) to find sources, or some other psychology-related database, you will be graded down quite substantially. Be careful if you seek help in the Learning Resource Center, as you may be directed to a database other than PsycINFO. Make sure that you use PsycINFO! When choosing your five sources, make sure the ones you select are ones that you could really use if you were writing a research paper. For instance, book reviews and letters to the editor are usually not good sources for research. So look at the whole citation to see what the source is, how old it is, what language it s in, and so on. Your concluding paragraph should say whatever you can say about what you found. Don t pretend to be more of an expert than you are, but don t sell your work short, either. Type (or word-process) your essay, double-spaced, with 1" margins all around. Please do not submit a handwritten essay. Your name and section number (05x or 07x) go on the front page. Be sure to turn in both your essay and the five abstracts you printed out. Attach them to each other staple or paper clip them together, or put them in a folder. It s your job to make sure that your paper stays together. I do not carry a stapler or spare paper clips. Remember that your topic and outline are due on Monday, October 20 th, and that the final assignment is on time if you turn it in at any time up to the beginning of class on Friday, November 14 th. If you turn the final paper in late, you will lose 25% of the possible grade. It s a very bad idea to wait until the last minute to do this assignment. It s worth 20% of your grade for the semester. If you wait until a day or two before the final due date and then run into problems, you ll have few ways to get help. Of course, plagiarizing is an even worse idea. Finally: On reserve under my name at the LRC front desk there are several excellent (and very different) papers that other students have submitted for this assignment. Looking at these will help you to understand how to do a terrific job on this paper!
Research Assignment - Page 3 Here are step-by-step instructions for getting into NCLive, starting PsycINFO, and doing a PsycINFO search. Your screen images may look a little different (depending on your browser and updates to the site), but this should give you the idea. Point your Web browser to http://www.nclive.org. This is the home page for NCLive. From this page, you will be asked to select your institution (Alamance Community College) and to enter a password. The password is crednice. Type it and click Submit. When the new page loads, click Use our Alphabetic list (halfway down the page). When the next new page loads, click P, up near the top of the page, for PsycINFO.
Research Assignment - Page 4 You ll be taken to the list of resources that start with P. Click on PsycINFO, of course! A new window will open, and after a few seconds of staring at a brought to you by NCLIVE.ORG screen, you ll be taken to the PsycINFO main screen (Occasionally NCLive is slow. Go have a cup of coffee and wait. You will eventually get through). You will see a search screen similar to the one above, but without anything in the Searching: PsycINFO box. This is where you ll start to search for articles on your topic. Let s say you want to know about the causes of phobias. As you can see, I have typed phobias in the search box already. I ve also checked the boxes for Peer Reviewed (this means that other professionals read an article before it was published, to help assure that it s of high quality), and English (because I want to read articles in English). I also specified articles about humans (using the Population Group box). For your search, you should check Peer Reviewed. You may make choices about the other areas as you like, to help ensure that the articles PsycINFO finds will be relevant to your topic and in a language you can read. When you re ready, click Search.
Research Assignment - Page 5 As you can see, one problem is that there are 5,837 entries for phobias. It might be a good idea to narrow down your search, right? So you ll want to be more specific. You re also interested in up-to-date research - say, within the last ten years. Go back to the search screen by clicking your browser s left arrow (at the top left of the screen). Now make changes to your search, as I ve done below: Click on Search again, and you will get a smaller list of sources. That s helpful, but you re still not getting much information about the articles and chapters PsycINFO is finding for you. How can you tell if an article would be useful to you? Click on the word Preferences below and to the right of the search box. Here is what you ll get:
Research Assignment - Page 6 In the Format row, choose Detailed instead of Brief. Now click the Save button down at the bottom left side of the screen. Your list of articles will reappear, looking like this: You ve narrowed down your sources (my list now only has 28), and by reading the summary of each one (called an abstract it s the paragraphs preceded by Abstract: in the screen shot above), you can decide whether you could actually use each source in researching your topic. As you find sources that would be useful to you, you can click on their names to see full citations, or you can click on the little file folder icon labeled Add to folder below each abstract. This lets you create a set of the sources that interest you.
Research Assignment - Page 7 Eventually, you re going to print the full citation of each of the five sources you choose to use. Note that you don t have to get, read or print the actual articles - only the citations, including the abstracts, from PsycINFO. If you are having trouble getting PsycINFO to give you what you want to know, try some of the other options on the screen. I recommend Thesaurus, up near the top on the left. Remember, your goal is to find five sources that would be useful to you if you really were writing a research paper. If a source has nothing to do with the outline you turned in, you shouldn t use it. Since you re going to summarize the abstracts for me, in your own words, you have to be able to understand each abstract that you use. If you can t understand one, either get help so you do understand it, or don t use it. How do you summarize the abstract in your own words? I strongly recommend looking at the model papers on reserve in the LRC to see some good examples. Your goal is to demonstrate to me that you understand what you re reading. Quoting directly from the abstract, or using your word processor s thesaurus to translate the abstract more or less word-for-word, are not techniques that show your understanding. They just show that you can copy. Make sure you tell me clearly about the important parts of the source you re discussing, and why you think it would be useful if you were really writing the research paper you ve proposed! Note that if you do find it necessary to quote directly from the abstract, you must identify the part you re quoting so there s no confusion about what is your writing and what is not. If you do not use quotation marks, or separate the quoted text from your own writing, then you are treating it as if you wrote it. Whether intentional or unintentional, that s plagiarism, and it will hurt your grade significantly. If you are having difficulty using PsycINFO, or finding sources for your topic, or summarizing abstracts in your own words, seek help from students who have figured out PsycINFO, from computer-savvy friends, or from me. Pick a topic that you re genuinely interested in, and you re likely to enjoy researching, reading and writing about it!