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Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 1 General This class is designated as a writing intensive course. To fulfill the requirements of this course you will need to turn in APA formatted writing assignments: 1. A 4 6 page Proposal: due by 11:59 PM, Wednesday 3/28/12 2. A 6 8 page Final Paper: due by 11:59 PM, Monday, 4/30/12 The page requirement includes both the title and references page (required for APA format), so you will need 2 4 pages of actual text for the Proposal and 4 6 pages of actual text for the Final Paper. Topics There are two kinds of topics you can choose: 1. A controversy surrounding psychoactive drugs. 2. Public statements made about psychoactive drugs. a. good example is a website about one or more psychoactive drugs published by some organization. b. In this case, your thesis will be that something is wrong about the statement. No matter what your topic is, your paper should be about one kind of psychoactive drug, either 1. A specific drug (e.g. marijuana, methamphetamine) 2. A very narrow class of drugs. For example, stimulants as a topic is too broad, but amphetamines is not. Anti depressants as a topic is too broad, but SSRIs is not. Generally the requirements are the same for both topics. See below for specific requirements that are different between the two topics. Thesis Remember a thesis are talking about psychology (and science in general) you are not really going to prove anything you are going to provide evidence for it. Overall, your paper should be a logical argument for the statement you make in your thesis. A bad argument ignores or dismisses opposing viewpoints. Sometimes people dismiss the opposing viewpoint by stating that it is just false. There are other bad ways of addressing the opposing argument (see below). Your job is to give a fair and accurate portrayal of the opposing viewpoint, then crush it with your evidence and arguments. Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 2 Some example thesis statements (consistent with the topics): Drug X should / should not be classified as a Schedule I drug (or II, III, IV, V, etc.). Harm reduction for drug X does / does not reduce drug use / drug related violence / overdose deaths in teenagers / urban communities / rural communities. Patients with disease Y should / should not have legal access to drug X. Notice that these thesis statements are 1) things that can be true or false and 2) are very specific. The same format applies to statements made on websites, TV commercials, etc.: The National Association of a Bunch Of People Who Think drug X causes Y is inaccurate / exaggerated / misleading. (NABOPWTA) statement that Articles & Evidence You will need to support your thesis (and possibly represent the other side) by providing evidence. In this case, the evidence you provide will be results from empirical studies published in a peer reviewed journal articles. The articles must have been published on or after January 2000. Remember your sources (empirical, peer reviewed journal articles) need to provide evidence that supports or contradicts your thesis. Because of this you need to make sure that the studies are related, that is they address the same topic. It is important to give a thorough description of what the researchers did and what the results were. There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary ones are: Your reader needs to be able to understand the topic, methods, and results of the article. Do not assume your reader knows anything about research methods in general or drug research in particular. undergraduate students may not tell you a lot about older adults or teenagers. A thorough summary tells me you understood the article. See below for a thorough description of how you should summarize your articles. Additional Sources You may need to use and cite more than just your journal articles: The most likely case is your textbook, e.g. using it as a source to explain what a Schedule I drug is, what harm reduction is, etc. Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 3 Websites are considered sources! Make sure you cite and include them in your references. There are specific ways to do this that differ from journal articles. Your paper may also need to include some historical data, e.g. references to older studies or laws. This is not unusual given that a lot of policy is based on outdated research. actual law concerning some drug? Overview of Content Your Proposal is a shorter version of your Final paper, so the structure and content should be similar: 1. Introduction a. Describe the general topic b. Describe the specific topic c. State your thesis d. Briefly describe you sources, and how they are related to your thesis. i. What evidence are you using to support your thesis? ii. What evidence are you using to fairly represent the other side? 2. Sources a. What was the overall issue addressed? b. What was the hypothesis? c. How did they test this (what were the methods)? d. How does this support your hypothesis or represent the other side? 3. Conclusion a. Briefly re state the contents of your introduction. b. Briefly re state your thesis, indicating how you supported it. Note that the conclusion is not part of the Proposal assignment (though you should think about it when writing it!). Topic specific requirements Controversy paper This needs to be a legitimate controversy in other words, something that people are actually obvious to other people. You may need to provide a source that indicates that the controversy does exist this could take the form of a news story which you very briefly summarize. You will need to provide arguments for and against your thesis. If this is a real controversy then there will likely be existing studies that support opposite sides. That said, it may not be easy to find one side an example would be finding a study that indicated there were no long term risks associated with using a specific drug. Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 4 Public statement paper You will need to indicate where the statement came from and provide a brief summary. This is not one of the two sources of evidence for your thesis. You do not need to spend paragraphs doing this as chances are the position can be summarized in a few sentences. You will need to properly cite the source both in the text of your paper and in the reference section. See the Purdue OWL guide for how to do this for things like websites, Public Service Announcements, etc. Remember that your thesis must be an argument against this public statement! In this case the thesis. General directions/ Things to think about No quotes! The only exceptions are: o You really need to state word for word what the public statement is. Chances are you probably do not have to you can summarize the message. o You really need to give examples of the kinds of questions used on a survey. You should rarely need to do this, since in most cases you can describe in general what the survey is trying to measure. se a survey, i.e. send out questions to a lot of people (or use existing survey data). It is not unusual for people to make the mistake of thinking some types of questions are surveys. One example is recording demographic data during an experiment (e.g. age, gender) or determining whether someone belongs in one group or the other (e.g. experiments or controlled studies that assign people to groups based on some kind of behavior like having a substance abuse problem). Terminology: o Make sure you use the correct name for a drug. You can use the common name (e.g. brand name), though you should at least mention the technical name. For example, you can talk about Ritalin in your paper, but indicate the chemical name at least once: An example in a (ridiculous) improves cognitive performance for everyone we should include it in the water o Avoid slang / colloquial terms (see below). Definitely avoid derogatory terms: this is psychology, we study human behavior, that includes psychopathology, and we view substance abuse and dependence as a disorder, not a moral failing. You may view it as a moral failing, but descriptions based on those terms are not acceptable for this paper (at the very least because they do not match with the concepts and terms we have discussed). Ethical / moral arguments Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 o 5 You will probably find it very difficult to find evidence to support a thesis that some action or policy is immoral. I will actively discourage thesis statements that involve invalid; they are just generally more difficult to write about. Overprescribed / Under prescribed o This is a kind of topic/thesis people are often interested in. Unfortunately, it is almost Consider what kind of evidence you would need to for that kind of thesis how often should it be prescribed? Can you find a study indicating that physicians are consistently misdiagnosing a disorder that merits a prescription of Ritalin (or Prozac, etc.). I will actively discourage this topic/thesis as well, again due to the inherent difficulty of writing a good paper about it. Good and Bad arguments (in support of you thesis) o Trying to describe the difference between a good argument and a bad one is beyond the scope of this document (and this class). It is a huge topic! Here are some pitfalls: Ad hominem attach: essentially, stating that a person is wrong because of something about the person. This is very common, and people tend to think this is a valid approach. Example: The NABOPWTA funds the Democratic / Republican / Green / whatever party, so their statements about zero tolerance / harm reduction are false / biased. Example: The study on the effects of drug X on Y was funded by the government, so the researchers ignored any findings that suggested drug X could have legitimate medical uses. Appeal to authority lot about a topic they are right about everything People often make incorrect assumptions about authority as well a common one being that if lawmakers say X is bad, then X is in fact bad (crack open a history book to verify that one). Correlation does not imply correlation this is often a problem with public policy surrounding drugs: General example: There is almost always a positive correlation between the number of churches in a city and the number of crimes as one but it is likely that both increase as the size of a city increases. Drug related example: if there is a correlation between the amount of drug use in an area and the amount of violence, does that mean the drug use caused the violence? Maybe but the correlation alone does not prove it. APA Formatting Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 6 The Blackboard folder for the paper assignment contains a number of resources to help you format your paper correctly: OWL Purdue APA Style Guide link: this is a great source for APA formatting information in general, and absolutely necessary for finding the correct reference format for your sources (especially things like websites). Example APA Paper: This document is an example for a Research Methods paper, but still contains a lot of useful information. It also gives provides you with an example of what your paper should look like. This is useful for almost everything, but you will probably still need to check the OWL Purdue website. use it before turning in your paper. Different Header/Footer for First Page: A screenshot with some notation showing how to get different headers for the first and remaining pages in your document. This is something you are similar. Some additional APA issues: Make sure you have everything you need: title page, reference page, etc. Be very careful copying references from the web or using a reference program. Even if you included in the Guidelines (on Blackboard) and the OWL Purdue website (or the APA Manual, if you have the current version). o section. This indicates that the reference was copied and pasted from a website, and in this case the reference is not formatted correctly. If you are not using Word to write your paper make sure you 1) convert it to Word format before turning it in and 2) the conversion did not alter the formatting. The assignments need to be submitted as a Word document no exceptions! If you do not use Word on a regular basis, you may want to plan to spend some time in an on campus computer lab checking (and possibly fixing) conversion problems. Article Summaries Your articles need to be about empirical studies and need to be published in peer reviewed journals: An empirical study is one in which researchers collect and analyze data. They may have conducted an actual experiment, looked at correlations based on a survey (one they did or existing data), examined records (e.g. DAWN statistics), etc. o People often make the mistake of using a literature review. These are articles that bring though you may find it helpful. Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 7 o A meta analysis is a statistical method of bringing together the results from a number of different studies. It is empirical, and is not just a simple literature review. This technically meets the criteria, but you almost certainly want to avoid these: they usually very complicated, and unless you have a good background in methods and statistics you probably will not understand the methods and results. Peer reviewed journals: o First: this means a journal! A journal includes articles about studies, and is published periodically. Your articles should not come from other sources, e.g. books or websites. o Peer review is a complicated process, but to put it simply it means that the articles are in the journal because other researchers reviewed the study and agreed that it was worth publishing. There are journals out there that are not peer reviewed these tend to include studies that do not meet minimum standards for both the study itself and the article describing it. How do you find these? We will go over it in class, but the simplest way is to do the following: o o e top, If you are doing this off campus you may need to enter your NetID and password. o Enter some search terms. can enter keywords, combine them in different ways (AND, OR, NOT), and specify what not select a field. o Before : reviewed o o different study types included in this category). You can choose the publication date here, or just check the dates for the articles that come up (remember your primary articles must not be older than January 2000). You should get a list of articles. Look at the titles and abstracts to see if they match what you were looking for if not: Make sure you are using the name of the chemical, not a brand name or slang You may want to check another database check with people in the library about how to do this (they get paid to help you!) If you find an article: evant. Make sure you see and below the abstract Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 o 8 You can use other search engines, but make sure you can check your articles are empirical and from peer reviewed studies One trick: try Google Scholar. The interface is nice (just like regular Google) and if you can occasionally get the article without needing to go through the library (this can vary, and is more likely to occur if you are on a campus computer). Make sure you check that what you find is an empirical, peer reviewed journal article. How? Go back to PsycINFO and type in the author or part of the title if it comes up, click on it, and do the same check described above. dicate you need a minor or major change in topic! Describe the article in your own words! This addresses several issues: You do not want to plagiarize. This is not just failing to cite your source. This also includes using es. Using synonyms and parts from different sentences are also examples of plagiarism. Using your own words indicates that you understand the article. There may be some complicated stuff you do not understand, e.g. statistics. I am working on the assumption that most people are not highly trained in statistics, so I do not really expect arguments against opposing evidence to include things like the authors used statistics incorrectly. It makes it much more likely that someone can understand your paper without being an expert (or even having taken the class). Individual elements of your summary: Overall issue: what issue were they addressing, and what was the specific hypothesis o The overall issue / specific topic should be the same as your specific topic. After all, the studies need to be about the same thing. o Hypothesis: this is important! A hypothesis is like a thesis statement: the authors are making a statement they are trying to support. The actual study is meant to do this. Sometimes articles have more than one hypothesis. Keep on the lookout for article). Population and sample: the sample consists of the people they actually studied. The population consists of the people the authors are trying to draw conclusions about. o For example, research in the department often involves student in Principles of Psychology and Research Methods. These students are the sample. The population is the group of people the sample is supposed to represent. This may be college students in general (e.g. a study about how college students cope with stress) or everybody (e.g. do women and men differ with respect to judgments of attractiveness). o This may be a place where you can argue that the opposing research does not address the problem. For example, a study about drug use may sample from one socioeconomic Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 9 group for the purpose of making inferences about everyone (i.e. ignoring potentially important differences between socioeconomic statuses). focusing on this would be if your supporting sources used a better sample (e.g. it also included people not in college). The same thing applies to things like age and gender. You should only argue that your opposing study is not a good argument against your thesis if your supporting article does a better job (better methods, more realistic population, etc.). Methods: What exactly did they do? This could be a number of things. o One example: they surveyed a bunch of people. This description though. You need to include things like what the survey was trying to measure. In some cases the survey is one that is commonly used, so there may not be a good description in the article it becomes your responsibility to find out more details about it (surveys like this always have a citation for the original article that described it. o Another example: an experiment. The researchers brought people into the lab and had them do different things and/or compared different conditions. Examples of this would be bringing people in and having them do some sort of task under the influence of a drug they would always compare this to how they did when they were not under the influence. o Another example: a non survey, non experimental study that is still done in a lab (or perhaps carefully controlled environments in the field). An example would be to compare people with a substance abuse problem to people without, again using some task. How is this different than the previous case? That is a research methods question, and if you are not certain, definitely ask me! Results: what did they find? o This is a description of the results of the study. Generally this will involve some sort of comparison based on what was measured. Example: people with a substance abuse problem were slower to react to a flash of light on the screen. The results would describe this in terms of the difference between the average amount of time between two groups. o Students often find papers that are based on correlational studies. A simple example: looking at the relationship between income and crime rates for substance abusers. This is still based on measurement: the results would say something like these two using the same example, the researcher might find a negative correlation between income and crime rates (one increases as the other decreases). Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 10 Colloquial / slang terms These are words and phrases that generally do not belong in academic / scientific writing. It is impossible to list all of them, but some examples are: n class, use those) to be derogatory) is a Psychology class) Any contractions there are a lot of . Correct citations For every source make sure you check both the correct format for the reference section and the correct format for citing the reference in your paper. A common mistake is to assume that the citation in the paper is always the author and the year this is not always true. If you are using websites directly or documents found on websites (e.g. government statistics) you should check the OWL Purdue website for the correct format. If you for ask me I have the APA manual, and that covers everything. General topic / Specific topic The general topic of every paper is psychoactive drugs. You paper will have a more specific / less general topic, e.g. medical use of a drug or harm reduction. This is too general for a paper, Make it more specific, e.g. focus on a particular drug, a particular method of harm reduction, a particular environment or group of people, etc. There is a practical issue here: if your general topic is harm reduction, you will find a lot of related papers too many to be of any use. If your specific topic is effectiveness of needle exchange programs in reducing transmission of disease among teenagers using drug X then you will find far fewer papers. This is a good thing! You are going to need to look at titles and abstracts to find useful papers, and this is much more practical if you have a few dozen rather than hundreds or thousands. Plagiarism Mentioned above, but worth mentioning again. This involves any case where you represent the ideas, thoughts, conclusions, etc. of another author as your own. Everything should be in your own words; this is true even when you have correctly cited the authors. Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 11 This is a serious and unfortunately common problem. Many students understand that you need to provide citations when describing the content of an article (e.g. the results of a study). Many understand that providing the citation and using the authors words is still plagiarism. lacing some of the words with synonyms and combining phrases from multiple sentences. The consequences of plagiarism can be very severe if you are having difficulty putting things in your own words or are not clear what counts as plagiarism talk to me before submitting your paper. Questions in your writing It is quite common for people to include questions in their writing. You should not do this! Your paper should contain statements. An example (starting off an introduction): Should we legalize Ecstasy? That is a question that needs to be addressed. Including questions seems like it might be making the writing more interesting, but in an assignment like this the use of questions is inappropriate. Relevant to your topic Remember that your thesis needs to be supported by evidence, and that your primary source of evidence will be the results of the studies you describe. An article (really the study in the article) is only relevant if the results are relevant. A common mistake is to assume that an article is relevant because it is about the same general or specific topic. Represent the other side In general a good argument is one that seriously addresses both sides of the argument. If your topic is about some controversy, you need to represent both sides of the controversy, and you need to do it honestly. If you are discussing a real controversy then chances are people on both sides of the debate have evidence. Your job is to report the evidence on both sides of the debate, and argue why the evidence for your thesis is better. This is difficult on the other hand, ignoring anything the opposing side has to say generally accomplished nothing. A practical example: if you are trying to argue that a drug should be legalized or decriminalized, you are going to have to find evidence (i.e. an empirical study) to support the position that it should remain illegal. Scare quotes This involves putting quotation marks around a word or phrase for reasons other than indicating it is a directly copied from some source. People often use this to emphasize they feel a word or phrase is inaccurate or misleading. Example in which the writer might be trying to ridicule the continue using the drug. Paper Assignment Overview, Psychoactive Drugs, Spring 2012 12 Can you make this point another way? Probably try something like: marijuana are not necessarily addicted to it, and a better description would be whether Source of your topic This is easy for the public statement option: the source will be a website, a television ad, a rehabilitation center pamphlet, etc. This gets tricky when you are writing about a controversy. You need to demonstrate that there the description of the controversy topic requirements described above. Support your thesis Evidence that backs your argument, in this case almost exclusively results of a study. If you are trying to argue that harm reduction is a better approach than zero tolerance in trying to reduce crime associated with drug X in rural areas, then a study showing reduced crime is actually reduced is evidence to support your thesis. Telling me what you did This involves describing your research process, for example: Remember, the paper is about the topic, the thesis, the articles, etc., not about what you did when you researched the topic.

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