Problem:
Your paper for this semester will focus on a social issue faced by clients at your agency. This paper will present facts and statistics regarding the social issue and will discuss how your agency helps clients with this issue. The paper will be broken down into several smaller assignments, which are each designed to help you write this paper section-by-section. The ultimate purpose of this paper is to link "research" with "real world" experiences that you encounter in your internship.
The research for this paper should be gathered from a variety of sources. Your paper should include information from scholarly articles and journals, reputable governmental or organizational websites, and sources at your internship agency. As an online student, you have access to many scholarly journals at databases through the LMC online library. Need Assignment Help?
The final paper will graded in accordance with the Final Paper Rubric.
For this first assignment, please choose a social issue that impacts clients at your agency. Examples might include poverty, homelessness, substance addiction, ageism, discrimination, healthcare, etc, etc.
After you have chosen the issue, begin researching current statistics and trends related to this social problem.
Submit the following:
Identify the social issue you plan to research.
Provide some large-scale statistics associated with the issue. These can be nationwide statistics or state-specific statistics. Relevant statistics might include: How many people experience this social problem? How does the problem affect/impact particular gender, age, race, socioeconomic status groups? Is this problem worse in specific regions, such as cities or rural communities or certain parts of the US? Provide numbers and your sources.
What does research tell us about the impact of the problem? Consider all levels of impact that may apply: personal, social, financial, spiritual (i.e. physical health, mental health, financial situation, family stress, etc.). As you discuss these, make sure you have numbers and facts, not just anecdotal information. This is a research paper, not a personal opinion paper.
What are the risk factors associated with this problem? (Again, cite facts. For example, if your social problem is poverty you might list school drop out as a risk factor and support this by stating "1 in 4 children raised in poverty end up dropping out of school"). Again, the statistics associated with risk factors should be large-scale state and/or nationwide data.
How does this problem specifically effect your local area? Suggestions include county statistics, client statistics, local reports and information.
This assignment can be submitted either as answers to all 5 questions or can be composed into paragraphs suitable for using in the final paper. I estimate that this submission should be 1-2 double spaced pages. This is only the beginning of the overall paper, therefore, please do not try to write the whole paper at once :)
The Week 11 Module includes a Sample Paper Outline and Sample Paper. You are welcome to review these. This week's submission should represent Roman numerals I and II on the sample outline.
In order to keep track of the sources of info in this submission, I suggest you insert in-text citations where needed. The citations do NOT have to be in proper APA format at this point. You may fix the APA issues before submitting the final paper. I am simply reading for informational content in this submission. You do NOT have to include a Reference page in this submission, either. You may want to begin working on the Reference page on your own, but it does NOT need to be included in this submission.
Important: Please choose an issue that your agency addresses. The second part of this project is to discuss how your agency helps clients who face this social issue by describing programs and services your agency provides to help clients with this issue. This project seeks to combine research with the practical experience you are obtaining through your internship. Therefore, the social problem and the agency should be compatible and should represent some issue (and clients) that you are encountering at your internship agency.