Term Project
Psychology of Women/Women's Studies 458
Hal S. Bertilson, Ph.D.
January 21, 2006

Purpose. The volunteer experience or application paper is designed to be an opportunity for students to experience the concepts and theories in more depth and to relate them to their lives. Concepts and theories that are experienced first hand and/or have application to student's lives are more useful and remembered longer.
Options. Option 1 is a volunteer experience and a five-page description of that experience. Option 2 is a ten-page research paper.
Option 1 Volunteer Experience
Content of paper on their volunteer experience. Describe in five pages or more what you learned from the experience and how this experience relates to what you've learned in class. Describe several experiences in your volunteer work that illustrate theories or concepts we studied in this class.
The volunteer experience
  1. Rationale. One of the values of feminism is social activism (Chrisler, xvi). Feminists value the empowerment of women by both individual and collective actions. (Recall the common feminist themes described in the Introduction to Chrisler, Golden, and Rozee's Lecture's on the Psychology of Women). Feminist ethics, like any ethical theory, "ought to move people from 'thinking the good' to 'doing the good' to enhance the human condition and create a more just and caring world" (Brabeck, 2002, p. 31). Surveys indicate that 47 percent of the population of the United States engage in community service (Aronson, Wilson, and Akert, 2005, pp. 383-384) and many high schools, colleges, and businesses require their students and employees to engage in volunteer work. Promoting volunteerism and community service learning should be part of any liberal arts education.
  2. Time Commitment. It would involve twenty hours of volunteering off campus at a charitable organization or social service agency during this semester. Volunteering at schools, courts, businesses, internships, and other non-charitable organizations do not count.
  3. Getting Started. Look in the telephone book under Social Services Organizations and make calls to see what is available. Some examples of possible volunteer experiences are the Center Against Sexual & Domestic Abuse, Duluth Emergency Food Shelf, Edgewood Vista, Safe Haven, Piedmont Group Home in Duluth, Aging Resource Center for Douglas County, Damiano Center, Boys and Girls Club of Superior, Boys and Girls Club of Duluth, nursing homes, Detox Center of Duluth, the Recovery Center, Life House, Piedmont Group Home, The Challenge Center, DRCC for developmentally disabled, Salvation Army Retail Store, Salvation Army Regency Office, the Challenge Center, Mentor Duluth, Harmony Club in Duluth, Villa Marina Nursing Home,etc.
  4. Volunteer Confirmation. Attach to the paper and signed confirmation by a representative of the agency that you volunteered 20 hours.
  5. Paper. Write a double-spaced paper of five or more pages describing what you did and your reactions to the experience. Describe several experiences in your volunteer work that illustrate theories or concepts we studied in this class. References are acceptable, but not necessary. In addition to the three or more pages of the paper, include a cover page.
  6. Cover Page. A cover page will be included. The students name will be in the upper right hand corner. This convention makes it easy to sort, record, and return student papers. The cover page will also include the course name and number and section number, date, and title of the paper.
  7. Oral Presentation. During the last several weeks of the semester. Each student will share her or his volunteer experience with the class.
Option 2 Application Paper
Stages of the term paper assignment.
  1. Students are encouraged to write a preliminary draft and submit it for comments. The draft will not be graded. It is an opportunity to confirm that your paper fits the assignment and to receive suggestions from your professor. The draft is not required, but is strongly recommended.
  2. The final draft of the paper will be graded to the specifications described in this set of instructions.
Evaluation. Papers must include the following elements and will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
  1. Observation--The student will describe some behavior(s) from his/her experience or from the current media. The behavior might be that of one's mother, aunt, brother, friend, self, or someone depicted in the media.
  2. Reason for student's interest--The intent of the paper is for the student to write about a topic that has particular interest to the student. The student will describe his/her reason for interest in the topic.
  3. Principle--The student will relate the behavior(s) to psychological concepts or theories. Be sure to describe why this behavior relates to these concepts and theories.
  4. Topic--Topics may be any concepts or theories discussed in your textbooks. Examples of topics include, but are not limited to:
    Anger in women
Depression
Love
Anorexia nervosa
PMS
Moral development in women
Power
Female sexuality		 Sexism
Women and poverty
Agoraphobia
Women and stress
Sexual orientation
Intimacy
Body image
Rape
  5. Length--Papers will be a minimum of ten double-spaced pages in addition to the cover page and reference list.
  6. Definitions--Use definitions from psychology textbooks and journals. Do not use definitions from dictionaries. Such definitions were not written in operational terms nor were they written in support of psychological theories.
  7. Effectiveness of Writing Style--The paper will be graded on two criteria: (a) The degree to which the paper meets the requirements listed in this set of instructions and (b) The effectiveness of the writing style (clarity, logic, organization, readability, grammar, spelling, etc.)
  8. Nonsexist language--Masculine words such as "man" and "he" create images of men to the exclusion of women. When masculine words are used with the intention to denote people in general, both female and male, stereotypes and prejudices are reinforced. Accordingly, APA prohibits the use of sexist language.
  9. Tone--Strive for a straight-forward, interesting writing style. Avoid a flippant style (e.g., "Here's what Thorndike says.")
  10. Cover page--A cover page will be included. The students name will be in the upper right hand corner. This convention makes it easy to sort, record, and return student papers. The cover page will also include the course name and number and section number, date, and title of the paper.
  11. Citations/References--The student must differentiate between the ideas of other authors and ideas of the student. Use the author-year citation method followed by a references list to acknowledge contributions of others. Every resource cited in your paper must be included in the references list. The convention in psychology is to acknowledge all resources used from your references. That may mean several author-year citations in a paragraph. Unless a paragraph is solely the student's ideas, it will have at least one citation. See example at the end of this document.
  12. References--There must be at least four references. One reference must be your textbook. Two other references must be another book or a journal article. In addition to these references, students may use other books, journals, personal communications, and web pages. References include only those resources cited in your paper. Those resources you read, but did not cite, are not included in the reference list. See the examples at the end of this document.
  13. Journals. At least one citation must be from one of the following journals. These journals are available in the Jim Dan Hill Library.
      American Psychologist
      Child Development
      Health Psychology
      Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
      Journal of Counseling Psychology
      Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
      Journal of Research in Personality
      Journal of Social Issues
      Ms.
      Psychology of Women Quarterly
      Psychological Bulletin
      Psychological Review
  14. Author-year citations in the body of the paper--Citations in the body of the paper generally are in the form of author surname and year (e.g., Nahbenayash, 1989). When the citation is a direct quote it is in the form of author surname, year, and page number (e.g., Bearheart, 1995, pp. 28-29).
  15. Quotations. Quotations sometimes add richness to your paper. They can capture the thinking and style of the author. Avoid, however, quoting long passages throughout your paper. Such passages detract from the readability of the paper. Papers should reflect your thoughts.
  16. Use of your textbook. When writing your paper be sure to include all the relevant information on the topic included in your textbook. For some topics your textbook describes several competing explanations. Be sure to acknowledge each of these competing theories.
  17. Data base--Psycinfo is the electronic data base most often used in psychology. You may access it through the UW-Superior homepage (http://www.uwsuper.edu). Select the following choices:
a. Jim Dan Hill Library
b. Alphabetic list of indexes with annotations
c. Under Indexes and Data Bases select |P|
d. Find Psycinfo and choose it. You will find a thesaurus, key words, author listings, title listings, and Boolean logic capabilities
Laura Jacobs, the Information Literacy Librarian, is available to answer your questions.
  18. Other sources of information--A good place to look for important studies is the reference section of a current textbook or serial (e.g., Annual Review of Psychology). You can use the UW-Superior automated catalog (sail.uwsuper.edu) to sort through their repository of books and serials. Some journals, such as Psychological Bulletin, specialize in literature reviews. The last issue of each volume contains an index. Recent years are kept in the stack on the main floor of the Jim Dan Hill Library. Older issues are kept in remote storage in the basement. A reference librarian will be happy to assist you in accessing to these resources.
  19. Importance of Author-Year Citation Method. In psychology we view the author-year citation method as standard. When reading psychology articles and books we expect the author-year citation to be used. Accordingly, there is a standard expectation in all university psychology classes that the author-year citation method be used. 10 points will be deducted from application papers that do not use the author-year method in the text and an author-year reference list. Feel free to discuss the author-year method with Dr. B. and show him a sample of your use of the method to be sure you are doing it correctly.
  20. Oral Presentation. During the last several weeks of the semester. Each student will share her or his research paper with the class.
Examples of citations in the reference list:
  Journal articles
    Bertilson, H. S. (1986). Change seeking and shock choices. Journal of Research in Personality, 20, 363-371.
    Bertilson, H. S., Bartz, A. E., & Zimmerman, A. D. (1979). Treatment program for borderline hypertension among college students: Relaxation, finger temperature biofeedback, and generalization. Psychological Reports, 44, 107-114.
  Books
    Brabeck, M. M. (2000). Practicing feminist ethics in psychology. Washington: American Psychological Association.
    Crawford, M. & Unger, R. (2000). In our own words: Writings from women's lives. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
  Chapter in an edited book
    Bertilson, H. S. (1991). Aggression. In W. Jones, B. A. Winstead, & V. Derlega (Eds.), Personality: Contemporary Theory and Research (pp. 457-480). Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
Citing a Web site
To cite an entire Web site (but not a specific document on the site), it's sufficient to give the address of site in the text. For example,
  Kidspsych is a wonderful interactive Web site for children (http://www.kidspsych.org).
No reference entry is needed.
For further information regarding APA guidelines for electronic reference formats see http://www.apa.org/journals/webref.html or http://www.apastyle.org/elecsource.html#71 APA
Example of narrative with reference list--The following illustrates the use of author-year citation system and a reference list. It includes an excerpt from Bertilson, Springer, & Fierke (1982, pp. 923-924).
“A series of recent studies have convincingly demonstrated that the use of male referents (when both genders are intended) often unwittingly misleads people into thinking of males, instead of both females and males. For example, Schneider and Hacker (1973) demonstrated that the `man' form of such words as political man (in contrast to political people) increased the likelihood that students in introductory sociology would choose pictures representative of the subject material that contained males only. Moulton, Robinson, and Elias (1978) showed that male personal pronouns in a writing assignment significantly reduced the number of college students who wrote about female characters. MacKay (1980) demonstrated the biasing effect of male personal pronouns by asking college students to read paragraphs containing the pronoun “he” or neologisms (E, e, tey) substituted for “he.” Eighty percent of the subjects who read “he” paragraphs responded male rather than female-or-male on at least one of the multiple-choice questions. Only 20% of the subjects who read neologism paragraphs made the same error.

“A review of these experiments indicates that this attritional bias is robust and not attenuated by a variety of stimulus and response conditions. Male attribution from generically intended nouns and pronouns has occurred whether the stimulus was presented by listening to tape-recorded sentences (MacKay & Fulkerson, 1979) or by reading sociology chapter headings (Schneider & Hacker, 1973), anthropological surveys (Harrison, 1975), fictional writing themes (Moulton, Robinson, & Elias, 1978), essays (MacKay, 1980); Sniezek & Jazwinski, 1981), or instructions (Schneider & Hacker, 1973; Sniezek & Jazwinski, 1981). The error of attribution has likewise consistently occurred during a wide variety of response modes: choosing representative pictures (Schneider & Hacker, 1973), drawing pictures (Harrison, 1975); Sniezek & Jazwinski, 1978), writing stories (Moulton, Robinson, & Elias, 1978), answering multiple-choice questions (MacKay & Fulkerson, 1979); MacKay, 1980), estimating life spans (Sniezek & Jazwinski, 1981), and listing names of people in different occupations (Sniezek & Jazwinski, 1981). Perhaps the pronoun `he' has been associated with the concept male often enough that `he' alone elicits the expectation of male even in those contexts when both females and males are intended. Consistent with this interpretation (MacKay and Fulkerson (1979) found that the male interpretation of generic “he” is perceptually more readily available than the female interpretation.

“Individually these effects of male referents may seem small-scale and subtle. The expectations for the concept male produced by any one or two male referents is relatively innocuous. But the cumulative effect may be most oppressive (Schneider & Hacker, 1973). Repetition of stimuli has been one of the classic and most robust determinants of memorization (Ebbinghaus, 1885). In addition it was suggested by MacKay (1980) that male referents have many characteristics of highly effective propaganda. They shape attitudes by (a) covertness (the use of the pronoun `he' is not usually seen as an intended influence attempt); (b) early age of acquisition (learning to use the pronoun `he' before learning to question critically the meaning of concepts; (c) indirectness (the pronoun `he' presents its prescriptive message indirectly, as if it were a matter of common and well established knowledge); (d) association with high prestige sources (the use of `he' in authoritative college textbooks); and (e) a high frequency of occurrences in the lifetime of an educated person. Thus pronouns and related male referents in textbooks, magazines, and speeches can unwittingly reinforce and perpetuate these attributional biases . . .”

References
Bertilson, H. S., Springer, D. K., & Fierke, K. M. (1982). Underrepresentation of female referents in pronouns, examples, and pictures in introductory college textbooks. Psychological Reports, 51, 923-931.
Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). On memory. Leipzig: Dunker & Humbolt.
Harrison, L. (1975). Cro-magnon woman—in eclipse. The Science Teacher, 42, 8-11.
MacKay, D. G. (1980). Psychology, prescriptive grammar, and the pronoun problem. American Psychologist, 35, 444-449.
MacKay, D. G., & Fulkerson, D. C. (1979). On the comprehension and production of pronouns. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 661-673.
Moulton, J., Robinson, G. M., & Elias, C. (1978). Sex bias in language use: “neutral” pronouns that aren't. American Psychologist, 33, 1032-1036.
Schneider, J. W., & Hacker, S. L. (1973). Sex-role imagery and use of the generic man in introductory texts: a case in the sociology of sociology. The American sociologist, 8, 12-18.
Sniezek, J. A., & Jazwinski, C. H. (May 1981). Man means man. Paper presented at the Midwestern Psychological Association, Detroit.