PSY-311 Module 1 Assignment

Recap: In Synchronous Session 1, we discussed your final project to create a community intervention proposal. This assignment is the first step in building this proposal. During the next three modules, you will create the introduction to the proposal: an introduction to the social issue and the literature review. 

Resources:

Video:

Wordvice Editing Service. (2018, May 21). How to Write a Literature Review. Retrieved from

1 mass media article

2 scholarly articles

the worksheet

Before you begin with Step 1 of the literature review process. Watch the video, How to Write a Literature Review, which will help you understand the purpose and the process.

Worksheet: Building the Introduction to Your Community Intervention Worksheet, Steps 1-3.

Step 1 in this assignment is to write two paragraphs describing your chosen social issue for your community intervention proposal and explaining its importance to society. Start with Discussion 2, what you wrote about the social issue of your choice, and what your classmates responded to you. 

  • What is the social issue to be addressed?
  • Why should we care about it? 

Take what you wrote in Discussion 2 and make any revisions necessary to expand and improve it. Type these paragraphs directly on the worksheet provided.

 Step 2 is the beginning of your exploration of research that has been conducted on the social issue. Youre building a literature review that provides the background of the social issue. In this step, youll choose three articles from the literature.

1 mass media article + 2 scholarly journal articles

  • One of these is a mass media article, one from a newspaper, a magazine, or an online source. This article provides a current perspective on the social issue. 
  • You then choose two additional articles from scholarly journals, a list of which is provided in course resources. Choose your articles carefully. You may need to review several before you find three strong ones for your purposes. 
  • List your articles directly on the worksheet. Use APA formatting for these three references. Keep them in alphabetical order.
    • Example of a reference entry:

Moritsugu, J., Vera, E., Wong, F. Y., & Duffy, K. G. (2019). Introduction to Community Psychology. In Community Psychology. London, England: Routledge.

Step 3 in this assignment is to begin organizing your literature review, which youll finish in Module 3. On the worksheet,

  • first list the key terms from each scholarly article under the reference entries. Example of reference entry with key words: 
    • Moritsugu, J., Vera, E., Wong, F. Y., & Duffy, K. G. (2019). Introduction to Community Psychology. In Community Psychology. London, England: Routledge.

historical context, fundamental principles, ecological foundations, prevention and promotion, social justice and empowerment, interdisciplinary

  • After reading each article carefully, include bullet-point notes for each. Place them under the reference entry and key terms. Be sure you capture the most important information. The key words will help you focus on this. Example of a bullet-point note with an in-text citation:
  • Community psychology is the study of individuals in context and the practice of working with communities on solutions to social issues that affect them (Moritsugu, Vera, Wong, & Duffy, 2019).
  • After each note, put the citation for that article. 
    • You’ll notice that you will be repeating citations. If you have four bullet-point notes, for example, you have 4 citations from that article. It may seem redundant, but you’ll need the repeated citations when you cut and paste your notes to organize the literature review in Step 4. 
  • After you include these bullet point-notes, add one or two bullet points with your own critique/synthesis of the article content (your commentary for each article). This is very important as a literature review is more than a summary of sources.

With the completion of Assignment 1, you have set up your worksheet, an efficient way to create your literature review. Youve:

  1. identified 3 of the 6 sources, which provide background and research on the social issue youve chosen to focus on for your course project, that youll use for the introduction to your paper,
  2. logged each reference according to APA style, 
  3. placed the key terms for each source under the reference entry, 
  4. created bullet-pointed notes for the most important information from each source and placed them under the reference entry and key terms,
  5. placed an in-text citation after each bullet-pointed note, and 
  6. created one or two bullet points with your own commentary on/critique of the sources, placing these under the bullet-point notes of information from the sources.

Youve started your review of the research, set up your worksheet, and documented your findings. Youve accomplished some important work! Kudos!