Aging and Intelligence

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Research paper on Aging

Instructions:

Research Paper

Definition: A research paper is an essay in which you explain what you have learned after exploring your topic in depth. In a research paper, you include information from sources such as books, articles, interviews, and Internet sites. You also use your own ideas, knowledge, and opinions.

Main Ideas: Your paper should focus on a central issue that interests you. Limit your topic so that you can cover it in a paper of the assigned length. Some examples of topics are elder abuse or victimization, poverty and older adults, loneliness among seniors, health care in old age, social support in old age, etc. You can have your own topic and research on that topic. Organize the paper around the points that are most important in your opinion. State your main ideas in your own words and use information from your sources to support them.

Paraphrasing and Summarizing: Incorporate ideas and facts from your sources by paraphrasing and summarizing. Write the ideas in your own way, using different words and sentence structures and leaving out unnecessary details.

Quotations: Use quotations when the author’s words are especially well chosen or memorable. When you quote even a short phrase, copy the exact words, enclose them in quotation marks, and cite the name of the author or speaker. I strongly discourage use of direct quotations, use quotations only when it is absolutely necessary to use them. Otherwise try to write in your own words and then cite the source in the parenthesis.

Documentation: When you give facts, paraphrase and summarize ideas, or quote someone else’s words, you must document your sources. As a rule, anything that is not common knowledge must be cited. Use the APA citation style. The purpose of documentation is to give credit to the author and to allow your readers to look up your sources. Your paper is stronger because you can prove that the information came from reliable sources.

Aging and Intelligence

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Steps in the Process

Choose a Topic: Select a topic covered in the course or assigned by the instructor. Here are some recommended topics. Select one of these or select one of your own interest and write a paper on the topic.

Topic#1: POSTMODERN IMAGES OF “SUCCESSFUL AGING”: Many older adults today are faced with the dilemma of “looking young,” while portraying the image of the “wise elder.” Some have turned to plastic surgery, expensive cosmetics, and monthly injections of human growth hormones to maintain a youthful appearance, while others spend several hours per day to maintain their bodies’ firmness despite the effects of aging. When asked why they spend so much time and money on maintaining their physical appearance, many older men confess that it is necessary to be accepted in the upper echelons of management. Women focus on both these concerns and the social stigma of looking old in American society.

If you decide to write on this topic, you can do use theories from the text to describe what “successful aging” is. Write about this concept. Then you interview 3-4 older adults and incorporate what you leaned from them into your paper.

Topic#2: AGING AND INTELLIGENCE: Many older persons are concerned that their intelligence has declined. Older people who are told by friends, family, test-givers, or society in general that they should not expect to perform as well on intellectual tasks because aging causes a decline If you select this topic, then write what your textbook says about it. Also, find 3-4 scholarly articles and incorporate the findings in your paper.

Topic#3: OLDER ADULTS’ QUALITY OF LIFE: A reliable evaluation of health takes into account not only a physician’s assessment of an older person’s physical condition, but also elders’ self-perceptions, observable behaviors, and life circumstances. If you select this topic write how quality of life measured for older adults, what are the influences, and include any details on this topic.

Do Library Research: The college library has the best resources to do your research. Look for a variety of sources, such as books, periodicals, and Internet sites. Books give a broad perspective, while recent articles provide up-to-date information. You can search for articles from many newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals in the library’s research databases, such as EBSCOhost. You can access the UNT Dallas Library’s online resources from off campus through your student user account.

Narrow Your Topic: As you do research, you may form a question that you want to answer or find that a lot of information is available about a particular aspect of your topic. For example, if you started with the topic elder abuse, you might narrow it down to the elder abuse by family members, or elder abuse in nursing homes.

Read Actively and Make Notes: As you read your sources, highlight and make notes in the margin (on copies). Write summaries of the main points in your own words, noting the source of each summary. If you copy groups of words, put them in quotation marks so that you will remember that you copied them.

Plan: Decide how to organize your paper and make an outline that will help you stay on topic and present your ideas in a logical order.

Write and Revise: Do not expect to write a finished paper all at once. First, get your ideas down on paper in a rough draft. Read it over and revise, trying to improve the content and organization. Ask someone else to read it and give you feedback. Edit your paper for sentence structure and word choice.

Proofread: Read over the whole paper slowly and carefully, checking for errors in grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. Make sure your paper follows the assigned format. Use the spelling checker on the computer, but do not depend on it. The spelling checker does not catch misspellings of similar-sounding words, and it frequently suggests the wrong word as a correction. The grammar checker is even less reliable. Remember: You make the decisions, not the computer.