Research Paper - Final Instructions
Throughout this course, you will be progressively building a research paper that will be submitted in stages to the instructor. Each of these stages is important to help you organize your thoughts and write a thorough review of established literature on a particular topic. The finished product for this assignment will be a double-spaced, 8-10-page-paper (not including title page, abstract, and references) addressing your chosen topic. You must include at least 8 relevant journal articles in your paper. At least 5 articles must be empirical* and recent (written within the last 5 years unless the citation is linked to an author whose work is seminal to your topic). This paper must be written in a scholarly fashion, strictly adhering to current APA standards. Do not express your own opinion.
You must use the following guidelines in constructing your research paper:
• Title page
• Abstract page
• Introduction must define and discuss the importance of your topic.
• Body of paper must organize the topic in a meaningful way and critically review the current empirical knowledge base relevant to your topic.
The paper must synthesize findings which address:
• Implications of considering diverse populations
• Implications of crisis/trauma-causing events on the topic under investigation
• Implications of resiliency
• The implications of neurobiology
• The integration of at least one developmental theory
• Conclusion section must include a discussion of practice/policy implications/recommendations and future research directions.
• Reference page must list at least 5 primary empirical sources.
• Follow current APA Publication Manual organization and style guidelines. Points will be deducted for format violations and grammatical problems.
*Reports of empirical studies summarize original research. Many journal articles are reports of empirical studies. In order to learn how to review the literature, it is important to be able to read and understand reports of empirical studies. Empirical articles have the following sections: abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, and references. The Research Paper that you are writing is a literature review based upon empirical studies; therefore, your paper will not have methods, results, and discussion sections as they would appear in an empirical paper.