For your term paper you will need to develop a detailed stress management intervention that will apply one or more of the specific techniques discussed in this course.
In developing your intervention program you will need to identify a relatively specific stressor (see Ch. 1 for the concept of a “stressor” as well as specific examples), a population of interest (e.g., college students, military personnel, children in public school, working adults at a company, etc.), and provide specific details on an intervention designed to facilitate coping successfully with the stressor.
You should support the value of your intervention(s) my citing relevant research findings about its empirically established benefits and theoretical relevance to the stressor you have identified. Discussing the value of your program will be important as you may need to entice administrators (school, business, or government) to make your program policy and/or compel your population of interest to take part.
You must address in detail how levels of initial stress in your study participants will be assessed and how you will evaluate the overall effectiveness of your stress management intervention(s) (i.e., show empirically that an individual’s stress has been reduced)? What specific things might people on your program have to do? How will people know if they’re doing it right – how will they track it? What are some of the costs that the initiation of your intervention might incur? An ideal program should be effective, safe, realistic, practical, easy to follow, and affordable.
The term paper should range from 8 to 10 pages in length. Papers that are longer than 12 pages (not including a title page and reference page) will not be accepted.
You are required to use at least 3 other sources besides your text and the relevant discussion notes that have been previously posted. All sources (other than the discussion notes) must be appropriately listed on a reference page at the end of your paper and cited in text using APA format. Appropriate sources include research articles from scholarly journals (several are referenced at the end of each chapter), other texts (ideally ones that are reasonably current), and any of the more informative web-pages that were suggested for this course.
You will be graded on completeness, readability, and clarity. In short, the better the writing, the better your grade will be. It is recommended (though not required) that you use subheadings in your paper that address each of the major aspects of the paper. The use of such subheadings will help to organize the paper, and ensure that you touch upon each aspect.