Your written paper will be based on a topic within forensic psychology/psychology and the law – it can be anything that interests you!
If you need help with organizing your paper, or finding inspiration, you can head over to any online library, and find some recent APA papers. Take a look at the abstract and consider what they’re discussing – what are their arguments? How do their arguments connect to the real world? Why should anyone care about these arguments in relation to your topic? – and how you might potentially build on that. Be sure to choose your own, unique topic based on these abstracts – DO NOT copy someones idea verbatim, though I’m sure you all know better than that!In your assignments, you need to have the following components:
- Statement of the problem. Reiterate/stipulate what the problem is, and analyze the underlying factors associated with it. For example, if my topic is focused on faulty eyewitness testimony, I’ll first explain what eyewitness testimony is, followed by why it’s harmful/who is impacted when it’s faulty (and how can it be faulty).
- Research question. How will your paper expand on the topic? For example, I might discuss strategies can be implemented to reduce errors in eyewitness testimony, or alternatives to it all together.
- Literature review. Tell me more about what the current literature (i.e., scientific articles) are saying about this topic. What previous research has been done? What were their findings, and what do they mean? How does that research relate to your question? You need to take your review from something broad (e.g., eyewitness testimony) to something more specific (e.g., your research question), and you can do this by identifying gaps in literature. What has previous research not done (I hope you guys can see how understanding gaps will then help produce/inform a new question, which you can base your paper on!)
- Arguments. This is pretty self-explanatory: what are you arguing for/against? What evidence supports your stance? Is there any evidence that refutes it? If so, how will you build your argument to accommodate that, and why does that make sense?
- Implications. Why should I care that you wrote this paper? Broader, why should psychology or the legal world care about your paper? For example, your research might present an alternative to the overuse of eyewitness testimony, which thereby illustrates a way in which wrongful convictions can be prevented to some extent. Here, we can see who is impacted, and how our research relates to it!
- Optional: Proposal. You get to choose whether or not you include this. You can either do a proposal, or do a critical conceptual analysis. If you choose to do the proposal, describe a study that moves in line with what you described in your paper (i.e., aligns with your arguments and literature review).
- References. This is the most obvious criterion: you must include reference! If not, you’re looking at plagiarism allegations, which no one likes. Please make sure your citations are properly formatted according to the latest APA edition. It’s expected that you’ll access at least 18-20 references, and although you may not end up using all of them, you should always cite the person who inspired you. You’ll lose marks for incorrectly cited references (I always try to be lenient to an extent, so it depends on how badly and how frequently you butcher them!)
Your paper should be 12-15 pages long, and in APA formatting. The only exception to this format is the need for a title page: you do not need a title page, but you do need a running head.
Some advice from Dr. Fatemi: do not buy your assignment from someone, and don’t write someones assignment for them. Doing this is lowkey embarrassing, but also severely not worth it. Please always make sure to stay away from any and all academic offences (e.g., don’t use ChatGPT, don’t plagiarize, etc. etc.).