Overview:
In this term paper, students will identify issues faced by parents of children that are of particular importance during a specific developmental period. For example, parents might be concerned about toddlers’ defiant behavior, preschoolers’ difficulty making friends, or school-aged children’s reluctance to do household chores. In total, each student must select at least 3 issues to focus their assignment on. For each issue, students will write a scenario in the form of a Dear Abby letter (see examples of Dear Abby letters here: https://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/archives).
After writing scenarios, students will research the issues in scholarly research journals. The results of your research will be translated into practical advice for parents, and this advice will be written up in the form of a response to the Dear Abby letters.
Instructions:
1. Identify issues. You might want to use your textbook or other class material to identify key issues for parents during different developmental stages of the child (using the “Parenting FAQ’s” from the textbook are not allowed). Try to focus on a diversity of issues that address the different domains of development (cognitive, physical, and social), rather than focusing exclusively on one domain. You don’t need to focus only on “bad” things; parents are as interested in learning about promoting positive development as they are preventing developmental problems. Think about common situations that arise with children of this age. Alternatively, you might consider unusual situations or issues faced by children.
2. Write THREE scenarios. Scenarios should be written using language consistent with the audience. In general, the style will be informal. You should be specific in identifying what the concerns are of the hypothetical audience in your scenarios. Scenarios need to be at least one paragraph in length.
3. Conduct literature search. Your goal is to identify research articles for each issue. I recommend using PsycInfo to conduct your search. You should use human development research based aritlces, no Wikipedia is allowed. Research articles include:
a. Peer-reviewed. The easiest way to accomplish this is to limit your search to peer-reviewed journals (an option in some databases such as ProQuest Direct). If you use PsycInfo –the database of my choice – you can rest assured that all search results will be peer-reviewed.
b. Scholarly journal source. By “scholarly source”, I mean journals that utilize peer-review and publish the results of original research. News magazines (e.g., Time magazine), popular press sources (e.g., Parents magazine), and books (even if scholarly) are not appropriate for this assignment. If you are using ProQuest, even if you select “peer-reviewed”, you cannot be sure the search results are articles in scholarly sources. Look carefully at the source titles in your search results. If in doubt, do a Google search on the source title to find more information. You can also email citations to the instructor or TA and we ought to be able to tell you if the source is scholarly.
c. Original research. You must select articles that report the results of an original research study. Reviews of the literature on a topic (i.e., summaries of others’ research on the topic) or theoretical papers are not appropriate. Look for these parts of the research article for clues that it is a research study: Introduction (or literature review – this is where the author summarizes prior research on the topic and identifies research questions and hypotheses), Methods (this is where the author describes the participants in the study, the measures used to collect data, and the research design), Results (here is a big clue – the author reports the results of statistical analyses conducted), Discussion (here the author summarizes the main findings and discusses interpretation of the findings). If these sections are missing in part or full, the article is not a report of original research!
d. Articles must be RECENT. Articles more than 10 years old are not appropriate for this assignment.
4. Read articles. Note the key findings of each article, and think about how the findings can be used to answer the question (or address the issue) posed in the Dear Abby letters.
5. Write responses. Construct a written response to each Dear Abby letter. Your responses should meet the following criteria:
a. Specific to audience. Don’t forget who your audience is when you construct your response: parents. Be sure your responses are specific and relevant to this audience.
b. Use scholarly research. Use the results of the research studies in your responses. Your audience likely won’t care about the details of the study, so you will need to think about what information from the study is most useful. All of your “advice” must be based on research. You must cite the research study (or studies) in your response, and include a reference page at the end of your paper. You may use material from the textbook in your responses as well, but you MUST also use the original research study information. Your answers should be 1 page in length.