SOCIAL SUPPORT & COMMUNITY RESPONSES PAPER CONCEPT PROPOSAL

For my focus will be social support in a university during the pandemic.

This part is just explaining how I picked the topic-

For this assignment, you should work with your partner(s) to identify a topic that you are interested in exploring in your social support and community response group project. As you think about an appropriate topic, keep in mind that part of this assignment requires you to outline some sort of community response to the COVID-19 pandemic that aligns with your paper topic. Try not to choose a topic so broad that identifying this community response piece will be difficult to nail down.

To complete the assignment, you should accomplish the following things:

Read through the Paper Assignment Guidelines Posted on Canvas.It is important that you read through these guidelines as a group to ensure that you understand the goals and criteria of the final paper. You should absolutely do this first before trying to make progress on the other aspects of this assignment.

Clearly Identifying your Topic of Interest: Once you have read through the assignment guidelines, a chief goal of this concept proposal is to have your group formally decide on a paper topic. When thinking about a topic, it is important that this topic is not too broad. A topic like “Types of Social Support”, for example, is too broad and will not work for this assignment. The same is true of choosing one context of support as your topic (e.g., “Support in Friendships” or “Support in Communities” are too broad). When thinking about your topic, I would encourage you to think about narrowing your topic by identifying how at least two of these things would fit together: A supportive context (this could be environmental, community-level, mediated, etc.), a relationship type (friends, romantic partners, family, workplaces, etc.), a type of support, or a specific supportive outcome. For example, you might decide as a group to write about the benefits and challenges of mediated support with older adults who are social distancing during the pandemic. This is a reasonable size for this assignment and likely to generate great opportunities around community responses! Or, you might look at social support in a university during the pandemic (something that certainly doesn’t hit close to home for any of you)! You might decide to write your paper on the relationship between support and stress for college students entering the job market during the pandemic. These are just examples. There are an almost infinite number of possible topics for this paper, so you should, as a group, choose something that you find interesting.

Identify Articles that can be used in Writing your Paper: A significant portion of your final paper involves writing a literature review. As such, it is important to make sure that, once you have decided on a topic, there is enough research out there to support writing your paper. You must include a minimum of 8 scholarly articles in your final paper, and you are responsible for finding these sources as a group. While you are able to reference and cite readings from class, they do not count towards your 8 scholarly source minimum. This means that you must go out and complete research outside of course readings. In this proposal, each group should identify four articles that can be used as a reference for the final paper. As a group, you are responsible for including a properly formatted citation for each article, as well as a one-paragraph summary of the article and its relevant findings.

Ask Questions and Explore the Topic: Once you’ve finalized a topic and spent a bit of time researching your topic, the final step in your concept proposal is to think about potential questions you might have. These should be questions about your topic, and not the assignment itself. What are the things about your topic that you are most interested in learning? Additionally, you should begin to outline your thoughts about the community response component of your paper. Given your topic, what might be some options for community responses?

Assignment Structure:
For your assignment submission, your group should submit a 3-4 page concept proposal. It should be written in the following format:

Introduction of Paper Topic (2-3 paragraphs):
Clearly identify your topic. Connect it to topics that we have discussed (or will discuss in class).
Explain why you have chosen this topic. This should be more than you like it or find it interesting. Why is this topic a compelling one for you, and what do you plan to learn from researching this topic?

Discussion of Research Articles(5 paragraphs total; one for each article; one final paragraph connecting article ideas)
Each paragraph in this section should begin with a full citation for the research article in APA format. For help formatting APA citations, see the article posted on the course website. Underneath each article, you should write a one-paragraph summary of the article, its key findings, and its relevance to your overall paper topic.
For the final paragraph in this section, you should make connections across the different articles included in your paper. How do these articles relate to each other? What connections can you draw across these different articles, and how do these connections help you gain a more thorough understanding of your paper topic?

Questions, Community Response Thoughts, and Next Steps (4-5 paragraphs)
Pose a series of questions that you group has regarding your topic and articulate why this question is important for your topic and how you plan to find the answer to it. You should have a minimum of 3 questions (one paragraph per question).
Outline three possible options that you would like to explore for the community response portion of this project. These don’t have to be fully fleshed-out ideas yet, but you should start to outline some of the responses that might make sense given your topic.
In your final paragraph, outline the next steps that you, as a group, plan to take to move your paper forward. Be as specific as you can both in the tasks you plan to accomplish as well as the timeline for accomplishing these tasks (include dates/deadlines, if possible).
WRITING GUIDELINES

Papers should be typed in a readable, 12-point font, double-spaced, with one inch margins. Please use APA style for all citations. Please separate each section of the paper with an appropriate heading. Don’t forget to proofread, spell check, and use proper grammar.

The overall tone of your paper should be professional and scholarly. That said, when outlining your questions as well as your next steps, you can use personal pronouns (“I”, “we”, etc.), though you should still maintain a professional tone.