PSY30011 Psychology of Wellbeing

Task:

This assignment requires you to identify and review an existing program (or intervention) that is at least partly based on the principles of positive psychology

The purpose of this review is to develop your skills in research, evaluation and presentation of ideas. 

You are to draw from current peer–reviewed research and publications, and your work should conform to APA requirements. 

Assignment should be presented with the following sections:

Description of the program and/or intervention

You are required to identify and describe a program that is in some way based on positive psychology. You may choose to describe a program running in your own area or a program that operates anywhere in Australia.

Examples of such programs might be:

a signature strengths based program

a program based on mindfulness and/or meditation

a program based on creativity (art, theatre, dance, music).

The program can be based on the general population or a specific population e.g. those suffering from depression. The most important thing is that your chosen program is related to positive psychology in some way.

You are to base your description on information publicly available in resources, such as brochures or information over the internet. You are not to approach staff of such programs for more information. Having numerous psychology students directly approaching staff would prove burdensome for people running such programs. However, since the quality of information and amount of detail provided in publicly available sources is highly variable, this aspect of the assignment has a small weighting compared to the evaluation described below.

You are to develop a brief description of the program. This summary will only include a description of the program and not the effectiveness of such programs that you have discovered from your literature review.

Literature review of the effectiveness of programs of this type

You are required to undertake a critical review regarding the effectiveness of programs of this type. You will need to use four to seven (4–7) references (cited within the body of your evaluation and properly referenced in a reference list) in order to:

critically review factors that influence program effectiveness

think critically about what makes programs of this sort work, and find literature that helps to establish this.

In undertaking this review, you will be required to use library resources such as PSYCINFO or other types of library databases to locate relevant scholarly references from books or journals. You are not to rely on populist articles about programs in newspapers or magazines, nor should you be using web sites for your reference material. These sources of information, however, may alert you about programs you might like to evaluate. You will then need to more formally seek out information. You are not required to do an exhaustive literature review, but rather to locate four to seven (4–7) relevant references (peer–reviewed journal articles and books—not websites). For those who do not know how to do searches using electronic databases, you may like to visit the Research (Links to an external site.) guide.

You need to evaluate the past literature on programs of the kind you have chosen. You need to demonstrate critical analysis of the material to ensure you provide a rationale for your claims. You will need to search more generally as you are unlikely to find information exactly linked to the program you review. We want you to do the review rather than paraphrase someone else’s review. Questions you might like to consider:

Has the literature demonstrated what makes the program work?

Have important factors in the program’s success been defined or not?

If you were designing such a program, based on empirical evidence, what would you include? (This is a helpful question for the major report in this unit).

Have studies been done to carefully establish what factors make the program more or less successful?