Final Project for Abnormal Psychology 3150 Instructions for Spring 2016 Conducting the interview The final project for this course will serve as a sort of continuation of your mid-term project. For it, you will be asked to attempt to make contact with a mental health professional who has worked in some capacity with individuals diagnosed with the particular mental disorder you researched for your mid-term project. This could include psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, social workers, counselors, or members of the numerous other mental health professions. You could even choose to contact a special education instructor or other teaching aide who works in a special education department. Ideally, this contact would be face-to-face. But given the many possible barriers for this within most of your personal lives, contact over the phone or even through email will work for this paper as well. In order to make contact with a mental health service provider, simply send a briefly written email in which you describe the nature of the project you have in mind. Ask them if they would be open to participating in a short interview, either in person, over the phone, or through email correspondence. Whether or not they agree to participate, please be courteous of their time and thank them for responding. You might have to email several mental health professionals or special education workers before finding someone who is willing to participate. This could require a little bit of work on your end, but there is no shortage of places online you can look in order to find potential participants. Most high schools, for example, have social workers, psychologists, and almost all have special education teachers. You could simply look on the website of your previous high schools, or a school nearby your current residence, and see if you could maybe track down emails for mental health professionals there. There are also likely to be non-profits that work in mental health fields somewhere in your area, which you could email with your request. If you happen to already have a relationship with a psychology professor at West Georgia who has worked as a mental health professional, then you are welcome to ask her or him. However, in order for us to avoid everyone asking the same few people in the department, please do not email a professor who you have not already worked with in some capacity (e.g. taken a class with, worked on a project with, participated in study groups with, etc.). Once you find someone willing to participate, keep the interview short??maybe 10-20 questions. You are free to come up with any questions you??d like, but try to center them on issues brought up by your mid-term paper. An example might be: ??did you feel like most of the forms of treatment you were able to offer your clients and/or patients with this diagnosis were successful? Why or why not?? Or ??how did socioeconomic factors influence your capacity to provide services as a professional.? But you could also ask about their personal experiences and feelings about the services they offered. Try to be as brief and concise as possible with the interview so as to respect the time of the person helping you out. However, also make sure you get enough information from them in order to successfully complete the project. Writing the paper After you finish the interview, you are to write a 3-5 page paper about your experience organizing and participating in it before analyzing the answers you were given. For the paper, spend the first page reflecting on your experience doing the interview. Was it difficult coming up with questions? Was it easy to find someone, or was it difficult? Why? Who is the person who ultimately agreed to participate in the interview with you? The second part of your paper, which should be about 2-4 pages, will consist of your analysis of the interview answers. Using either the same sources you used for your mid-term or new ones you have come across, compare the information you gathered from the interview with the information in the sources. Were you able to learn anything from the interviews that you perhaps could not have learned from journal articles and webpages alone? What was the most interesting thing they told you? My hope with this project is that you get to learn from the perspective of someone who has worked directly with the diagnosis you are interested in and use that to build upon your mid-term paper in order to have a solid 8-10 page project by the end of the course. The due date for this assignment will be the Wednesday of final exam week. The exact date and time will be posted on CourseDen later in the semester. The format of the paper will be the same as what you used for you mid-term. As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.
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