Positive Psychology is the course name !!
Topic: Romantic Love and happines this topic has a broad approach as it covers romantic love and happiness in people with different gender roles, ethnicities, culture and socioeconomic status.This topic can also be refined with topics like Arrange marriage in India, marriage and divorce, personality, teens, sexulality, therapy and education with some history to it.
Need 8 scholarly sources total and atleast 5 from PsycInfo and the remaining three from books or chapters.
Option 1: Research Paper (Literature Review)
You may do a formal research paper that looks at a theory or research area relevant to positive psychology. In your paper your must review at least 8 scholarly sources (at least 5 of which must be journal articles located through PsycINFO; other sources may be books or book chapters with my approval).
Your literature must:
a. be organized around a particular topic (see below for a list of potential topics);
b. integrate the different sources into a coherent whole; and
c. identify questions that need further research.
Choose a Topic
Your first step is to choose a topic. Here are some ideas or sample topics; your topic does not need to come from this list:
* Predictors of prosocial behavior (helping, volunteering, etc.)
* Happiness across the lifespan
* Resilience following trauma
* Gender differences in happiness
* Well-being across nations
* Wisdom as a foundational virtue
* Romantic love and happiness
* Marriage and happiness
* Religion and virtues
Guidelines for Writing
A literature review is more than a list and summary of studies on your topic – it is a critical analysis of the literature as a whole. You will need to integrate the studies into a meaningful framework, identify themes, and point out gaps in the literature and identify questions for future research.
Here are some guidelines for how to go about doing that, once you have decided on a topic and searched the relevant literature. (A review on predictors of happiness by Myers, 2000 is a good example and I will use it to illustrate points.)
Myers, D. G. (2000). The funds, friends, and faith of happy people. American Psychologist, 55, 56-67. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.56
Organizing/Preparing to Write
* Scan the articles that you have to identify the content, and then group them into categories. These categories may eventually become sections in your paper. Myers (2000) used categories including Wealth and Well-being, Close relationships and Well-being, and Faith and Well-being (with finer-grained subcategories; e.g., under close relationships he looked at Need to Belong, Friendships, and Marriage).
* Pay special attention to previous literature reviews. These sources often provide the best overall view of the existing literature. (Note: your review will need to be somewhat unique, and cannot simply go over the same literature as an existing review.)
* Take notes on each article: define key terms, identify key statistics (you might use these at the beginning of the paper), and characteristics of the studies:
* Was the study experimental or correlational (or something else)? (This has implications for internal validity)
* How were participants recruited? (This has implications for external validity)
* Note any other strengths or weaknesses you see
* Distinguish between evidence and assertions (opinions)/speculation.
* Identify Gaps in the literature – What specific topics do you think should be studied, but have not been studied yet? What kind of methodological shortcomings are there (e.g., are all studies correlational, or do they all sample from a particular narrow group of people)?
Synthesizing/Writing
* Develop an outline – this requires you to integrate the sources, thinking about how they fit together. Developing categories (discussed earlier) is very helpful, because the categories may become sections of your review (see Myers, 2000).
* Start with your major argument (e.g., Myers, 2000, noted that there has recently emerged a “scientific pursuit†of the question of who is happy, and then a bit later identified wealth, relationships, and faith as likely candidates for causes of happiness)
* Include major sections for different groups of studies you have identified; these sections will present themes or identify trends, including relevant theory.
* Include a critique of the existing literature and point out gaps or limitations (this could be done within each major section, or in its own section later in the paper); it could involve critiquing the topics that have been studied and/or the methods that have been used
* Suggest areas for future research; this should be tied to either (a) the gaps you have identified or (b) weaknesses of the current literature (e.g., arevall studies correlational?)
* End with a short conclusion (see Myers, 2000)
* Remember that this is not a list of studies; you should organize your ideas so that they “tell the story†of the research on your topic
* Writing your paper:
*use APA style (cover page, reference list, header, etc.)
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