Adulthood and Aging Interview Paper
Adulthood and Aging Interview Paper
Interview Paper/Research Paper
You will reflect on the information that you have learned over the semester.
Topics covered in relation to Adulthood and Aging:
Developmental psych
Diversity
Identitiy development & Personality
Cognition
Physical changes
Disease and illness
Relationships
Education and work
Coping and support
Death, Dying, Bereavement
Movie Week!
Healthy lifestyles
Housing
How can you see applying the information you learned?
How might it pertain to your own life?
How did the information you learned about help you understand friends or family members better?
How is learning about aging helpful to you as you continue your studies and then, ultimately, enter the workforce?
It is an interview paper.
For this assignment, you must interview two people and compare their experiences. You may either do a comparison of older-old (75+) and younger-old (60-75) or a comparison of a man’s experiences with aging to a woman’s experiences (make sure they are of a similar age).
The people may be family members or someone you are otherwise acquainted with. Do not provide identifying information about your interview subject in your paper – the subject’s identity should remain confidential. You can just use the person’s first name. Your interview should be conducted in-person. If this is impossible, you may conduct a series of phone interviews. Do NOT interview them together.
The primary focus of your reflection paper should be the connection of interviewee’s responses to course themes, issues, and terminologyfrom the book. Your paper should clearly and knowledgably reflect at least 7 major topics from the course, making it a truly “comprehensive” project. When writing your paper, do not rewrite the interview word-for-word. Summarize what was said and use relevant quotes to support your ideas.
When interviewing your participants, be sure to discuss how they are living their lives on psychological (how they are feeling – emotionally), social (friendships, lovers…), cognitive (memory, disorientation…), and physical (physical ailments) levels. For most subjects, the interview process will take about an hour.
Projects must be typed with the following specs: 4 to 6 pages, 1” margins, 12 pt. font, double- spaced.
The last page of your paper will be your interview questions.
Always spell-check and read it out loud for grammatical errors, focus on organization.
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.