Based on personal interviews, you will write a six to eight page paper comparing two adults of different ages in the context of developmental theory

Case Study Paper Instructions

Description: Based on personal interviews, you will write a six to eight page paper comparing two adults of different ages in the context of developmental theory.

Due Date: This paper is to be submitted by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Monday in Module/Week 7.

Purpose: In studying adult development and aging, we should never lose sight of the fact that our intent is to describe real people living real lives. This project will allow you to  become acquainted with the lives of two adults by conducting an interview with each of them. The interview will be a general exploration of the psychological and social aspects of the individual’s life experiences—an attempt to discover what has given purpose, meaning, direction, and redirection to the lives of two adults at different points in their life course. The suggested topics for these interviews will reflect many of the issues we cover in the course. My hope is that the interviews will become a reference point for your work in the course. The course material will help clarify your interviewees’ interpretations of their adult lives, and at the same time, your interviewees’ opinions and insights will help you to understand and critique the course material. In the process, you will gain interviewing experience, enhance your critical thinking, hone your writing skills, and apply psychological theory to real life.

Details:

1. Choose interview subjects. You should select two individuals who differ in age by at least 20 years. It is recommended that you include someone over the age of 60, and you are cautioned against interviewing a relative or close friend. Face-to-face interviews are preferred, but phone interviews are permissible. If you have difficulty locating respondents, you may find it useful to “trade acquaintances” with other class members. Please do not use college students (emerging adults, aged 18-25) as respondents.

2. Conduct the interview. The interview should be conducted face-to-face. Telephone interviews are not recommended and require advanced approval by your instructor. This means that you will need to do some planning ahead. Specific interview questions appear below. You do not need to ask all of the questions. In fact, you should adapt questions to the specific experiences of the interviewee, be flexible, and follow up on interesting points that arise. In your conversations with each respondent, you should attempt to discover who they are as individuals: their abilities, attitudes, and interests; the personal and sociocultural forces that have shaped their lives; the developmental trajectories they have followed in various facets of their lives; their evaluations of the past and expectations for the future. This will require careful listening and a fair amount of probing (follow-up questions on their initial answers).

The interview questions below offer a basic interview protocol;a set of questions that you can ask respondents. Feel free to add to or subtract from the list in order to meet your own interests. The objective here is more to explore several dimensions of individual lives than to focus on a rigidly-defined set of issues.

3. Write the paper. After completing the interviews, you’ll need to write a report. This should not be a simple, descriptive biography of each person, but a focused, critical comparison of these two lives. Essentially, you want to tell a story about these two lives—but not necessarily the story that you were told by the respondents. It is unwise to take everything they said at face value. Also, you may learn as much by looking for what respondents did not say as by analyzing what they did say. It is wise to build your paper around what you regard as the central themes in the lives of these individuals, or around two or three issues that allow you to highlight the similarities and differences in their lives. In searching for these themes, be sure to consider theory and research that we have read in the course. In fact, it’s a good idea to adopt a particular theoretical perspective for the paper. You should refer to the textbook (or perhaps another reading) for possible frameworks for interpreting and analyzing the interviews. These sources should also be referred to and cited in your paper.

Paper format:

·         Paper should be APA format with six to eight pages, excluding title page and References page.

·         Times New Roman, 12 point font, 1” margins. 

·         Sections:

o   Title page

o   Body (6-8 pages)

§  The paper is not simply a biography of each person.

§  It is virtually impossible to include all of the information that you gleaned from the respondents. Your task is to be selective, to identify themes that allow you to provide a critical, integrative assessment of these two lives.

§  Class members are likely to focus on different facets of adult development (and draw from different theoretical frameworks) in their papers. However, it issuspected that each paper will include:

·         Abrief description of respondents (age, gender, marital/parental status, occupation, salient personality traits, etc.).

·         A description of the major psychological factors (attitudes, values, beliefs, objectives) and social forces (roles, relationships, life events) that have given purpose and direction to their lives.

·         A sense of the continuity and change respondents ascribe to their lives.

·         A comparison of the current character of these two lives as well as the two life trajectories, with comments on what might account for similarities and differences observed in the two respondents.

§  Avoid 1^st person pronouns (I, my, etc.) and 2^nd person pronouns (you, your, etc.) unless you are quoting your participant.

·         You must use MS Word, and you must submit electronically to SafeAssign in Blackboard.

·         Name your file as “last name 235”

Interview questions

Below are interview questions to help guide your thoughts.

Introduction

To start off, I’d like to get a sense of what a typical day is like for you: how you spend the morning and the afternoon and evening.

·         Was yesterday a fairly typical day?If yesterday was not a typical day, think back to  the most recent typical day. Why don’t we go through that day and you can describe what you did, where you went, who you saw, and so on.

·         (Take advantage of opportunities to probe for the person’s major life responsibilities, vocation, hobbies or interests, important social relationships, living situation, etc.)

·         Can you tell me a little about your earlier life, before you became an adult?

·         Where did you grow up?

·         What was your family like?

·         What did you enjoy doing when you were young?

·         What are some of your fondest memories of childhood?

·         What do you enjoy most about your life right now? Least? How does that compare to earlier years? Do you think things will change as you get older? How so?

Young Adulthood

·         At what point do you think you stopped being an adolescent and “graduated” to being an adult? What made that happen?

·         Was adulthood everything you expected it to be? Was it better or worse than being a teenager?

·         What do you think are the most important challenges that people face when they’re just entering adulthood?

Personality, Self-Concept

·         If I asked someone who knew you really well to tell me what you were like, how do you think they would describe you? (What are you like, as a person? What is important to you?)

·         Do you think you are the same sort of person now that you were as a teenager or young adult, or have you changed?

·         In what ways are you the same now as you were back at the beginning of adulthood?

·         In what ways have you changed?

·         What accounts for the changes? What made them happen, or how did they happen?

·         Some people talk about going through a “midlife crisis.” Has that happened to you?

·         (If Yes) Tell me about that.

·         (If No) How do you think you managed to avoid a midlife crisis?

·         Some people talk about turning 30, 40, 50, or anyage—as being a little difficult to accept, or a real traumatic experience. Did anything like that happen to you?

Social/Cultural Background

·         What kind of community did you grow up in? (Probe for details of social class and ethnic composition, population density, prevailing values, economic opportunities, etc.)

o   How has that affected your life and/or the kind of person that you are?

·         What kind of community do you live in now? How does it affect your life now?

·         How important is your ethnic background to you? How has it influenced your life as an adult?

Stress and Coping

·         What would you regard as major high points of your life so far? Why?

·         What have the major low points been? How did you get through those?

·         There’s a lot of talk about stress these days. What are the major sources of stress in your life right now?

·         How stressful do you think your life is right now, compared to what it used to be?

·         Do you expect that in the future, your level of stress is going to go up or down? Why?

·         When you encounter a stressful situation, how do you respond to it?

·         Do you have certain ways to try to reduce or avoid stress?

·         How successful are they?

Cognitive Development

·         How well do you think your mind is functioning now, compared to 10 or 20 years ago? Do you think you’re as “sharp” intellectually as when you were a teenager or young adult?

·         Have you noticed any changes, as you’ve grown older, in your ability to concentrate, or to learn new things, or in the way your memory works?

o   (If Yes) Have you done anything to try andadjust to these changes?

·         Some people say that the older we get, the wiser we get. Has that been true for you?

Social Relationships

·         Outside of your immediate family, how much energy do you put into social relationships these days—relationships with friends, neighbors, co-workers, and so on?

·         How often do you get a chance to be with friends and acquaintances? What sorts of things do you enjoy doing with them?

·         What do you find to be particularly satisfying and meaningful in your friendships and social relationships these days?

·         Has that changed across your adult years?

·         Do you think that with age, friendships become more important, less important, or stay about the same?

Religion/Spirituality

·         What roles do religion or spirituality play in your life? Is faith important to you?

·         (If Yes) Explain how your faith has made a difference in your adult life.

·         (If No) How do you think that lack of faith has impacted your adult life?

·         Would you change anything about your life, from a faith perspective?

Growing Older

·         As you think about growing older, becoming a “senior citizen”—is that something you look forward to, or something you’re not too thrilled about?

·         Have you thought about when you retire, or when you don’t have the responsibilities of raising children any longer?

·         What do you expect life to be like then?

·         Have you made any plans for your “retirement” years?

Death and Dying

·         I guess one certainty about life is that it comes to an end for all of us. Have you thought much about your own mortality, your own death?

·         Do you regard death and dying as something to fear, or something to look forward to, or just something that’s going to happen?

·         If someone were to tell you that you had 6 months to live, how would you respond to that?

·         Do you feel prepared to die?

·         Do you feel comfortable talking about dying?

Miscellaneous

·         Most of us are pretty satisfied with the way our life turned out, but once in a while we wish something could have been different. How about you? If you were able to change something about your current life or your past life, what would it be?

·         If you could be any age that you wanted, what age would you choose to be? Why?

·         What do you think the best age period or the best time in life is?

·         What do you think the worst age period is, or the worst time in life? Why?

·         Are there some major principles or values that you think have guided your life?

·         Have they remained the same since you were just beginning adulthood?

·         What are the major lessons that you’ve learned from life?

·         Right now, what are your plans for the future?

·         What do you expect to be doing 10 years from now?

·         What do you expect life to be like for you in 10 years?

·         How about in 20 years?

(Probe for how concrete their experiences are, how much change they anticipate, what they regard as the source of changes.)

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