VERY IMPORTANT
Instructions: The purpose of the paper is to let students be able to apply the theories or principles of Cultural Psychology to their real life events. It is important that students present theoretical concepts and theories learned from the class; if a paper does not contain such elements, it will not receive a high score in grading.
Your paper will be graded in terms of (a) originality or creativeness, (b) importance of the topic of your choice, (c) coherence, (d) amount of work you did, and (e) quality of writing.
You can choose one format from the followings:
1) Observation study: You can observe the behavioral (including linguistic) patterns or personality traits of members of an ethnic group. Such behavioral patterns or personality traits should be objective and replicable so that they can also be observed by other researchers. Apply the theories or principles that you learned from classes to explain the pattern. In addition, take an advantage of your own cultural backgrounds; it is well known that many students at Baruch College and their family members have diverse cultural backgrounds.
2) Archival study: You can choose a (at least relatively) well-known piece of literature (such as novel or essays), movies, plays, TV dramas, etc. that display an interesting cross-cultural contrast between two or more cultures. One example would be the clips of the movie (entitled Lost in translation) that were shown during the class. Describe specific parts, scenes, page numbers of your interest and apply the theories or principles that you learned from this course to provide explanations. The movies or video clips that were already used in lecture notes CANNOT be used for your project.
Note: Remember that what matters the most in the paper is to apply cultural psychological concepts or theories to real life examples (simple observations without referring to due relevance to psychological concepts/theories will not be sufficient).
Other instructions about the paper
Students are expected to follow the instructions below in writing up the manuscript:
- a) Students should create a cover page that includes an appropriate title of the paper and name of the author
- b) It is recommended that you structure your paper such that each section or sub-section has headings.
- c) Students should have the references section at the end (which is not counted as part of the 6 pages) for whatever citation you mentioned in the paper.
- d) Too many grammatical or typographic errors will have some impact on the grade.
If you have any further questions or concerns regarding the group project, please feel free to contact the instructor
