Overview
Group papers, as defined in the syllabus, involve creating a single document incorporating your group members’ work and answering the questions for that topic.
This paper should:
- Be approximately 1.5–2 single-spaced pages
- Include all group members’ names
- Include citations for any articles you use, including the ones discussed in class
The paper is due by midnight on Friday, May 14th—although we will not hold class on that day.
(If external sources are useful, use Google Scholar, PsycINFO, or any of the databases through the Bard library.)
Intervention and Study
Based on our discussion of resilience and growth before and after trauma, your group should first identify the level of prevention you hope to target (primary, secondary, tertiary) and then how you would improve resilience through an intervention. Use the ideas discussed by Harvey (2007), and feel free to reference other ideas or visions of resilience that you find yourself. (For a few examples, you may choose to read about positive psychology, grit, or mindfulness training; certainly, you may have your own ideas!)
In your discussion and subsequent paper, you should be sure to:
- Explain the focus of the intervention; what should it help? You likely should include a specific definition of resilience.
- Decide when your intervention is targeting: is this primary prevention? Or is it after a traumatic experience?
- Decide who your intervention is targeting: what are their demographics? Think about what community would be best served by your intervention, and how you would provide it to them
- Think about what makes this a community-based or community psychology intervention, rather than just an intervention taking place in a clinical setting.
Then, think about how you would know whether your intervention worked. Specifically, be sure to:
- Define a measure of clinical significance. What would let you know whether the intervention worked in a way that you could explain to everyone? (i.e., a score on some measure is not the right answer here; for example, this is the equivalent of saying “students would get a letter grade higher on a quiz after attending my new tutoring program!”)
- But also, can you find a measure that would also show clinical significance? What would be the smallest effect size of interest to change? (Here, we are meaning a score on a questionnaire or other self-report measure. How many points on the measure would represent meaningful change?)
You may choose to focus more on developing a study of the intervention, or on describing the intervention; either way, please spend a bit of time on both.
Notes