Monday, January 28, 2013

UWG Semester 2 Update: Research Topics

Hey everyone, its been a busy last couple weeks on my end but I wanted to throw up a post to list some of current research projects both for classes I'm enrolled in and other non-class side projects.  It is still fairly early in the semester so most of these ideas are merely tentative but they can provide a bit of a brainstorming snapshot for what I'm currently interested in researching....

Brief / Narrative Therapy - I will have a group (4 persons) and a pair (2 persons) projects for this course.  Both have undecided topics at this time.

Psychology of Suffering Disorders:
          Group Project / Presentation - Undecided at this time, however, it may include working on our state disaster mental health preparedness website ---> georgiadisaster.info  --> This is an extremely comprehensive website that you should consider taking a look at.
          Individual Paper - For my own purposes, the tentative topic for this paper is "Terror Management Theory."  Specifically I will be looking at how trauma and disasters (either on a personal or group scale, or both) affect one's awareness of their inevitable death (mortality salience).  From there research will include coping mechanisms or strategies for dealing with the given predicament.
Here are some useful links: http://www.tmt.missouri.edu/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_salience

Theory and Practice of Clinical Assessment:
          Research Paper / Presentation - This presentation is to be focused on the implementation of two assessment tools / instruments.  Again, this is extremely tentative but I am looking at using a Quality of Life Inventory and Beck's Hopelessness Scale.  

Research Methods:
          I am planning on using this course to prepare for my thesis work next year.  Part of the course requires us to submit a research proposal.  However, rather than chugging out yet another long essay explicitly for the purposes of the course, I will be using the resources and information in the course to prepare a "pre-thesis" proposal.  I will also actually be conducting this study / research myself in the future.  The study will look at perceived emotions relating to freedom, isolation, responsibility, and death in a comparative study of terminally ill medical inpatients compared to non-inpatients and persons not receive medical treatment.

Other Projects:
          Philosophy - Being an avid Camus fan, I have been re-reading "The Plague" and gathering up some information on Kafka, particularly interested in "The Castle"
          Technology - I'm trying to get more acclimated to my Linux computer and use the command prompt more, rather than relying on the graphical user interface (point-click) as much.  My personal distribution of choice is Linux Mint.  For those unfamiliar with Linux, have a look here



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