Adult Aging Structured Interview – Additional Information Available

Course Project (150 points)
Part 1: The Structured Interview (50 points) –
As we grow older, many aspects of our lives will change, psychological systems will evolve. We will take on new responsibilities as we pursue careers and have children, and we will shed obligations that were once important as children become less dependent upon us for resources. Until we live through these years, it can be incredibly difficult to anticipate the impact that these changes have on our identities. You will interview a senior citizen to get a sense for how noticeable physical, social, emotional, and cognitive changes are, as we grow older. Please find one senior citizen (i.e., someone over the age of 60) to interview. You will summarize their responses to the below questions. It is important that your interviewee remain completely anonymous. Please do not indicate your interviewee’s name nor how he or she is related to you in your paper. For your interview, please use the questions (A-H) listed below. In addition, please come up with three additional questions to ask your interviewee (I, J, and K). You should specify how you developed these three additional questions so that it is clear to the reader why you asked them of your interviewee. You are awarded points for explaining why you asked the questions that you developed on your own.

Questions to ask interviewee:
A. Do you have the same personal interests and hobbies now that you did when you were in your 20s? If not, what has changed and why do you think that your interests have evolved? How have they changed over time?
B. How would you describe your parents’ approach to raising you as a child? Do you see any similarities between their styles and the style that you used to raise your own children or grandchildren? Has any aspect of parenting changed over time? Are these changes due to changes in the times or due to a decision that you made? (If the interviewee does not have any children, ask him/her what they feel has changed in terms of how others raise their children.)
C. Take a moment and think about your best friend. What is it that makes this person so special to you? How might you handle a disagreement with this person? What types of strategies might you avoid using if you and your best friend had a disagreement? Have you noticed any differences between how you react to conflict today and how you used to react to conflicts as a young person?
D. What has been the most noticeable change in your physical health over the past 20 years? Has this change created any limitations on your daily activities? If yes, what have you done to compensate for these changes so that you can continue to be successful?
E. Some researchers feel that the mind slows down as we grow older. Apart from the occasional lapse of memory that everyone experiences (younger and mature alike), have you noticed any changes in the ways that you think about problems or puzzles? In the ways that you plan activities? In what keeps you motivated to stay focused on a particular task? Finally, have you ever felt that someone was treating you different than others just because of your age? If yes, please describe the experience and how that person’s behavior made you feel.
F. Spirituality is a large part of some people’s lives. Over the past 20 to 30 years, have you experienced a deepening of your faith? If yes, how would you describe this process? If no, why do think this is not the case?
G. Does any member of your family help you to carry out activities that you used to do on your own? If yes, would you characterize this shared experience as being positive, negative, or a little of both, and why? If no, imagine that one day you did need help; how do you think this would impact your family and friends?
H. In terms of your relationships with your friends and family, what do you think is more important: (1) having a large number of people that you can count on and interact with, or (2) focusing time and energy only on those with whom you have close relationships? How have your priorities changed within your relationships? Are the interactions that you have with your friends and family different today than they were 20 years ago?
I., J., K. Please create three new questions to ask your interviewee. These questions should deal with issues that interest you the most. When you describe your interviewee’s responses to these three questions, please be sure to indicate what motivated you to ask each of these three questions.

Please take notes on your interviewee’s responses. From them, compose a summary that is 3-4 pages, double- spaced and uses the following formatting: 12 -point, Times New Roman font, and 1-inch margins. Please also add a cover page (which does not count toward the 3-4 pages). Again, it is important that your interviewee remain anonymous. Please do not indicate your interviewee’s name nor how he or she is related to you in your paper. Do not type the questions themselves into your paper. I obviously know what they are given that they are found above in the syllabus. Rather, you are expected to organize your paper using appropriate paragraph structure to discuss what your interviewee said. You may quote your interviewee, but, given space limits, you might find it easier to paraphrase. Below is the rubric that will be used to score your interview.
Part 2: The Research Report (100 points) –
Students completing PSYS 423 will first conduct an interview (Part 1 on prior pages) and then afterwards complete a brief research report to further analyze their interviewee’s responses. This report shall be 5 to 6 pages in length, double-spaced and use the following formatting: 12-point, Times New Roman font, and 1-inch margins. Please also add a cover page and a reference page (which do not count toward the 5-6 pages requirement). How are psychological systems evolving over time in your interviewee? This is the major theme of this report. Your report is to be divided into three segments: (1) Identification of Evolution of Interviewee, (2) Review of Empirical Evidence on System Evolution, and (3) Summary of Evolution.
Segment One: Identification of Evolution of Interviewee (Target: 1-1.5 pages)
To begin this report, first select three questions from the interview that you are most interested in further considering. This will vary between students based on your own interests as well as the nature of responses provided by your interviewee. You will note that all of the interview questions asked the interviewee to consider how various aspects of their psychological systems have changed over time (e.g., social functioning, cognitive functioning, spirituality, the role of physical abilities in self-care, etc.).
**Within the first segment of your report, please briefly:
(a) Discuss your interviewee’s responses to the three questions that you selected. Do not copy and paste what you have written from your interview. You must re-word it and be concise.
(b) Highlight the extent to which the interviewee has changed within each psychological system or function discussed,
(c) Indicate whether you believe these changes or lack of changes are consistent with what one would expect to result from normal aging (a.k.a primary aging) and/or are consistent with non-normal (or secondary) aging (e.g., something very specific to the health or environment of the interviewee). Be sure that you discuss why these changes are normal/non-normal by comparing your interviewee to older adults in general using what you have learned this semester.
(d) Describe what these changes mean to the interviewee in terms of their ability to live, interact, learn, and care for themselves. In other words, do the changes in one or more aspects of the interviewee holistically impact who the interviewee is and how they exist in their world?
Segment Two: Review of Empirical Evidence on System Evolution (Target: 3-4 pages)
The second segment is the most important and challenging part of this paper. In the first segment, you discussed your interviewee’s responses to questions about three different psychological systems. In the second segment, you will gather some empirical evidence from the literature and describe whether or not your interviewee’s responses are typical of what psychologists find in their research by imagining your interviewee as an actual participant in the experiments. What is empirical evidence? Empirical refers to measureable evidence, or research studies!
Please use a Library database, like PsycInfo ( http://libguides.wku.edu/go.php?c=10924250 ), or an open-source database, like Google Scholar ( https://scholar.google.com/ ), to locate one or two journal articles for each of the three topics that you discussed on the first segment of this report. You MUST examine at least four journal articles in your paper. You will be able to make stronger arguments if you examine six journal articles in your paper. For instance, if you were interested in learning more about what psychologists have found in terms of how aging impacts memory, you could enter terms like "aging," "forgetful", "memory," etc. into the databases to locate specific articles on the topic. Ultimately, you are looking for empirical evidence (i.e., a study that has data) to describe what would reflect typical change in a person’s functioning over time for each of the three topics discussed in segment one. Once you have found 4-8 journal articles with empirical studies, please read through these papers and note whether the evolution in the psychological system described in each paper is similar to what you have described for your interviewee in Segment One. Also note what techniques the authors are using to ask and answer their research questions. Look specifically for the types of tasks or questionnaires that the participants are completing when they take part in the study. You are going to be describing how you think your interviewee would behave if they were in the study (e.g., "If my interviewee participated in the study, he would have been asked to memorize five different lists of words with 20 words in each list. Given that the authors expected older adults to perform more poorly than younger adults, my interviewee would have likely performed poorly relative to me if I had participated. However, given that my interviewee is in good health, he probably would have scored above average on the memory test. In other words, if average was 12 words per list, my interviewee would have remembered at least 12 words and probably no more than 15."). YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO USE THE ARTICLES THAT YOU HAVE READ AS ASSIGNED READING IN CLASS. I am expecting you to read articles that you have not read for class to support your arguments. If you have difficulty locating useful articles, please do not hesitate to ask Dr. M’ski. He is quite willing to assist you. Note that some articles have been posted to Blackboard for each topic to facilitate your search in a separate folder. You may use these articles because they are not assigned readings for the individual units.
**Within the second segment of your report, please:
(a) Describe what specific age-related changes the authors of the article were examining and how they examined them. Discuss what the general outcomes were for their work (i.e., what did they find). Then connect this back to what change you did or did not observe in your interviewee. It should be clear what these papers say when it comes to the impact that aging has on bringing change to the psychological systems of your interviewee. Because you are going to mention abstract ideas like memory, attention, physical health, parenting, etc., please be sure that you also briefly define each concept that you mention.
(b) To make things more concrete, briefly describe how your interviewee might have performed within the study/experiment in each article. To do this, you must describe how the authors are measuring human performance (e.g., thought, behavior, emotion, or physiology). What kind of test or survey did they use? What data were gathered from the participants by the authors to address their research questions. Be specific. Talk about the actual measures used and how the authors conceptualized a psychological process from the measure. Then predict how your interviewee would behave given the specific measure(s) used. That is, what if your interviewee were a participant? How would he/she have responded to the questionnaires in the study? And,
(c) Discuss the impact that any age differences described in the journal articles might have on how an older adult is able to function in today’s world. In other words, how large or dramatic of a change is being suggested by the empirical evidence that you have discussed. If there is a change as measured in the lab, does it mean anything for the older adult’s ability to take care of themselves and live a normal life?
Please note that for this segment of your report, you should address (a)-(c) above for each psychological system/function separately. You should have two to three paragraphs within this segment for each of the questions that you identified in segment one. Also, while you write this segment of your report, it is absolutely critical that you use APA formatting rules for both the in-text citations and your reference section. Please let me know if I can help you with this part of your report. I will provide some helpful websites on Blackboard to facilitate this component of your report as well. One more thing to note… please do not use sources that are overly general and that fail to cite studies done by researchers, so please do not use Wikipedia, books, magazines, newspapers, websites, etc. It is possible that you might not understand every aspect of the journal articles that you cite. This is okay and fully expected. The journal articles should contain information that are useful to your arguments even if some of the methods and statistics are hard to follow. Note that you do not have to describe every measure in the studies that you read. Stick with providing details about the ones that are most important to the point that you are trying to make.