Overview
NO AI WHATSOEVER OR WILL BE REFUNDED
PROVIDE PROOF THAT IT IS HUMAN
FIRST PART OF THE ASSIGNMENT
INTERVENTION REFLECTION (in Assignments)
To sharpen your skills at reading the research literature intelligently and critically and to learn about
applications of knowledge to improve an aspect of social/personality development or prevent a problem in
social/personality development, you will select a specific question of interest to you concerning
improving an aspect of social or personality development and reflect on one recent research article on
the topic in depth. This will lead to a short reflection paper paper with the article reference and abstract
(first page of paper AND post it in Discussions under Intervention Articles for everyone to see) and a
two-page reflection, worth 30 points total.
Purpose: The goal is to improve your skills at understanding, communicating, and evaluating research in
developmental psychology, especially intervention research that can optimize development or prevent
problems.
Activity: Write an issue‐oriented and thoughtful reflection on a selected empirical research article on a
well-defined, specific question concerning optimizing an aspect of personality or social development
in infancy, childhood, and/or adolescence (either by building competence or by preventing or treating
problems). You'll discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of the research, the implications of its
findings, and the next steps needed in this research area. The paper or a similar version of it should not
have been used previously or currently for another course.
Choice of Article: This is really important: Your selected article should present a specific, published,
empirical research study assessing or evaluating the effects of an intervention aimed at improving
an aspect of social and personality development or preventing or remediating problems in such
development in infancy, childhood, or adolescence.
The study:
· should be related to a topic in this course and of interest to you
· should be recent (published between 2021 and 2025)
· should be published in a respected, high quality journal in psychology or a closely related
field that publishes research studies
· can have either children/adolescents or parents/peers/teachers or both as the targets of the
intervention
· should be an original report of one empirical intervention (or at most two) presenting
quantitative data (numbers like means and percentages, statistical analyses), with sections
typically called Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion.
I labor this so you pick the right kind of article. Do not pick a qualitative study (pick a quantitative one),
an author’s discussion of several of his/her group’s studies, a literature review, a meta-analysis (review of
many studies), a doctoral dissertation, or as you may see in the medical literature a “trial” report that
presents the methodology of a study but not the findings of a completed study.
Here are some illustrative research questions: How can we intervene to increase secure parent-infant
attachments in families with a depressed parent? How can parents help teens learn to cope with social
anxiety? How can parents be trained to help foster the development of prosocial behavior in children?
What can be done to make adolescents more accepting of peers from other ethnic/racial groups? How can
peers be mobilized to reduce bullying in schools? What is an effective approach to preventing the
development of antisocial or aggressive behavior?
Search tip: PsycInfo is usually best but other Subject Databases or Google Scholar may be useful too for
some topics. To find a topic of interest, experiment with key terms and put together combinations of
them—e.g., (aggression or antisocial) and (teen* or adolesc*) and (interven* or program or treatment) and
(parent* or mother* or father*)
You can identify appropriate articles by doing a search for relevant terms in PsycInfo or by browsing through recent developmental journals to
identify a relevant study. Child Development, Developmental Psychology, and Developmental Science are
leading scholarly journals in developmental psychology. Other good ones include: Child Psychiatry and
Human Development, Development and Psychopathology, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology,
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Applied Developmental Science, Journal of Child and
Family Studies, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent
Psychology, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Journal of Genetic Psychology, Journal of
Family Psychology, Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Pediatric Psychology, Journal of Youth
and Adolescence, Journal of Research on Adolescence, and Social Development. The hard part is to
choose studies that all center on similar research questions.
You must get the full article Read it thoroughly! Dig into the details of the Methods
section to find out how they intervened and with whom and how they assessed the effects of the
intervention(s), i.e., what measures they used. Note: Don’t worry if you can’t understand the results
section of your article well, as some are very technical, but do try and do look at tables and figures. The
Discussion section will usually summarize the main findings before discussing and interpreting them.
Product:
Your paper should have three sections:
A. Article reference and abstract. It should be in APA form and look about like this example of
an appropriate intervention study: https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001150 Also post it in
Discussions under Intervention Articles, for full credit.
B. What makes this study a good contribution to our knowledge of how to optimize
development? Consider the importance of or need for the research, the quality of the research, and
the value and implications of the findings. In the process, connect the article to relevant
material/messages from this course.
C. How can we improve on the study and build on it? Consider how this study could be
improved and suggest what you would most like to study next on this research topic—and why.
Things to think about: Thoroughly analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the study. Make clear which
points the authors made themselves by citing them and which points are your own ideas. Think about
things like limitations of the research design or the measures, inconsistencies with previous studies cited,
unanswered questions and debated issues. What does this study tell us about optimizing the aspect of
social or personality development of interest to you? How does this study compare to what we would
ideally like to see in an solid intervention study? What needs to be studied further or learned? How does
the research relate to more general theories, themes, concepts, and issues in social and personality
development? What are the implications for understanding, for future practice or intervention, for further
research?
The paper, to be submitted through Assignments, should be approximately 3 pages, double‐spaced and
should include the sections outlined above. No reference list is needed; if you want to cite something cited
in your article, you can say Authors, date (cited in authors, date of your article). You can just cite the
Parke text (give page number) or a course reading (authors, date) or a PowerPoint and I’ll know what you’re referring to. Cite a bit but don’t make a reference list.
Grading: The paper will be worth a maximum of 30 points and grading will be based on the following
considerations: selection of an appropriate article for review (10 points); discussion of contributions (10
points); discussion of limitations and future directions (10 points). All should be clearly written and
reflect an-depth understanding of the research study reviewed, and an ability to think critically and on
your own about the study and its broader implications for theory, research, and practice.
Intervention Article Additional Paper Tips
1. Read the syllabus!!
2. Refer back to the Article Critique Guide and the Research Concepts Glossary if
useful.
3. Read the WHOLE article thoroughly—including the nasty middle parts that tell you
about their sample, measures (conceptual and operational definitions?), and research
design. Consider how the study was done as well as what it found.
4. Don’t worry if you don’t understand the analyses; some are readable, some are not.
Do look at the Results and (understandable) tables and figures; also use the Introduction
and the Discussion section to understand better what they looked for and found.
5. In reviewing an intervention study, you might look for strengths like these (not an
exhaustive list):
a. reasonable sized sample from an appropriate target population;
b. experiment with random assignment of participants to treatment conditions
(vs. quasi-experimental design with attempts to control for extraneous variables);
c. a standardized or “manualized” treatment program;
d. blinding of experimenters and participants to who is in which condition
e. reasonable, reliable, and maybe even valid measures;
f. control of extraneous variables like who administered different treatments and
where;
g. follow-up assessment beyond an immediate posttest;
h. info about numbers of dropouts from treatment conditions.
6. Go ahead and get mad at them if they don’t tell you important things. It’s common to
say little about measures developed by other people after citing the measure’s source.
But you may find the article vague and may want to look at an article cited as the source
of a more detailed description of the intervention or a measure to get a better
understanding.
7. Don’t worry too much about APA form except use double spacing, 11 or 12 point font,
and I hope a Word doc—NOT Pages, not something that doesn’t open up in the
Blackboard window).
8. See Syllabus on citing articles (e.g., Doe, 2015, cited in Parke et al., 2019, p. xxx);
same for an article cited in your chosen article but not read by you. To cite a ppt:
(NAME of PowerPoint). If it’s a specific study I describe, you can say, e.g.,
(Smith et al., 2021, cited in NAME of PowerPoint).
9. Remember, each of you will be telling us IN A MINUTE in the last week of class,
the biggest message you got from your article.
SECOND PART OF THE ASSIGNMENT
5 points for this posting and one minute in class presentation combined. Post Your
Article Reference and Abstract (see ATTACHED SAMPLE) for the Intervention Reflection
here any time but no later than class time.
You're doing this so I and others can see studies that may be of interest to them. 5 points
if you do both of the above.
8.
Sample; PsycNet ( https://psycnet.apa.org/), if you search for the title of an article you want,
gives you a nice looking record with all the proper parts (as in the example), but you may have
your own ways.
Example of article in PsycNet. Get all this one way or another: Authors, title of paper, journal the
paper is in, volume and pages, the doi number that goes right to the article online, and abstract:
Wantchekon, K. A., Umaña-Taylor, A. J., Sladek, M. R., McDermott, E. R., & Updegraff, K. A.
(2021). Adolescents’ ethnic-racial centrality moderates effect of school-based intervention on
ethnic-racial identity exploration. Developmental Psychology, 57(3), 432–442.
https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001150
Abstract
Research suggests that the process of adolescents exploring and developing clarity about their
ethnic-racial identity (ERI) is an important developmental competency. However, the extent to
which individuals view their ERI as central to their overall self-concept (i.e., ERI centrality)
informs the degree to which they choose to explore their ERI, potentially moderating ERI
development. Utilizing data from a randomized controlled trial of a school-based intervention
focused on increasing adolescents’ ERI exploration, the current study examined whether the
intervention effect was moderated by adolescents’ baseline ERI centrality. Study participants (N
= 218; Mage = 15.02; 49% female; 63% ethnic-racial minority; 28% free/reduced lunch)
attended a high school in the southwest United States. Moderation analyses indicated that
adolescents’ ERI centrality at baseline (1-week pretest) significantly moderated the
intervention’s effect on Time-2 ERI exploration (12-week posttest). Further analyses of simple
slopes revealed that the intervention produced significant increases in Time-2 ERI exploration
(relative to attention control) for adolescents with average and higher (+1 SD) levels of ERI
centrality at baseline, but not for those with lower levels of ERI centrality at baseline (−1 SD),
which suggests ERI centrality may have encouraged participant engagement with the
intervention. Sensitivity analyses accounting for baseline to posttest changes in ERI exploration
and examining long-term effects of the intervention on exploration provided additional support
for the specificity of this moderated intervention effect to the 12-week posttest. Our findings are
consistent with notions from social identity theory as well as previous research that suggests
that ERI centrality encourages ERI exploration among adolescents. (PsycInfo Database Record
(c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved.)