5/25

Today, I went to Rider again. I sat in on a seminar for one of Dr. Cottingham's classes. In the class, I learned how to correctly site sources in social science studies using APA format. I also learned how to use psychINFO more in depth. Overall, this class was really helpful because I will have to learn a lot of this stuff in college, since I am studying psychology. I still really love this internship because of all the helpful things it is teaching me prior to going to college.

post for 5/23 (internet was down)

Today, I went to Rider University again with Dr. Cottingham. I spent a lot of the day learning how to use a program called SPSS and logging information from the study into it. I basically had to come up with labels, values, and titles for every questions and score on the survey. It wasn’t particularly challenging, just very tedious and time consuming. I also researched articles on Ebscohost for Dr. Cottingham that pertained to the study she is doing and had some research done already on the topic. Today, Dr. Cottingham also had me get all of the names of the churches that we are conducting a few of the studies at, as well as the addresses and Reverend’s names and post mark letters to them thanking them for their participation. We also began to put together “thank you” gifts of information on health disparities from the study for the participants. I researched the different disparities to find brocheours on then and fact sheets that would be appropriate to give to elderly people about these health disparities.

Although a lot of today’s work was mindless and tedious, I am still really enjoying the study and cannot wait to start plugging the data into SPSS to evaluate the results of the study. I also am really excited because Dr. Cottingham invited me to come with her to DC in July when she will be presenting her study at a psychology conference.

SDLC

Wednesday, Tamica and I went to see the completed SDLC applications and began to go through the majority of them, in order to pick out student who we think are good candidates. We basically were just looking for students who seemed as if they could benefit from the conference, but also showed passion about diversity and commitment to making MKA a more accepting place.

(I didn't know if I still had to journal about this since this was part of the first half of my may term)

First Day At Rider

Wednesday I went to Rider, and I absolutely loveeddd it! From 3-6 Dr. Cottingham and I discussed the study more in depth and as she explained the assignments I would have for the day, we also talked a lot about the field of psychology as a whole. We discussed the whole situation with Mr. Stern from a psychological perspective. We talked about how this event may affect children in the school, teachers at the school, and even the psychological aspects that make people do things such as Mr. Stern. Dr. Cottingham also described a career path that I think I am now interested in. There was a psychologist that came to speak to parents at the school, and as her profession she utilized both developmental and forensic psychology (which are the two main fields I am interested in, but because they are very different I never thought I could mix them). As a career she talked to victims of molestation and rape (often kids and teens) as well as talking to the criminals that committed the crimes against them. She goes to court and often speaks on the cases. I use to want to be a lawyer as well so this unique profession really grabbed my attention.

Once I began my independent work, I was evaluating anonymous surveys for the study, stamping them so that we could classify them by numbers rather than names, copying new surveys, filing and organizing the already completed surveys, and enveloping blank surveys. Although this wasn't as fun as the first part of the day and took me hours to do all of them, I knew that it was extremely important.

Finally, Dr. Cottingham showed me how to use a program called FFS, which I will have to log all the data into eventually and on Monday/ Wednesday I will have to catagorize all of the data with.

Since I have to be familiar with the technology and terms used in Dr. Cottingham's class and study, I reviewed from my psychology book from the independent study I did with Mrs. Bennett. I also reviewed my abilities with excel that I learned from AP stat. Dr. Cottingham also has material she wants me to review from books from her classes she teaches at Rider University so that I will understand the classes I sit on in, and be able to contribute more to the study than if I had no knowledge of the software. Last time we met, she began to explain some of the technical software typically used in psychology and the different skills AP stat has taught me that I will need in pursuing my major of psychology in college. One of the reasons I love this internship so much is because Dr. Cottingham is teaching me skills that I will have to learn next year, so I will already have a strong grasp on them and really be able to do well in my classes. It also is giving me a lot of exposure to the field, even though this is not the exact type of psychology I want to pursue, all the fields are linked and will use the same basics or research and development.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Blogger will be in read-only mode while we resolve some maintenance issues. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by Eddie at 12:35 PDT

Since blogger is down today I will just post this post tomorrow.

But today I spent a few hours going over the survey that I got from Dr. Cottingham, that she will be giving to the participants in the study. I edited it for her and sent her the corrections via email. I found the survey and the study overall very interesting. Some of the questions that she put on their to test African American’s knowledge on health issues were actually somewhat challenging to me. I spoke with her about the survey previously and we talked about how it would be harder for the elderly to answer the questions (which is who the surveys are being given to) rather than youth, because my generation has grown up to know about HIV, Cancer, Diabetes, and so on, while these health disparities were not discussed and taught years ago. However, even Dr. Cottingham admitted that she could not answer all or the questions without the help of the internet. I found that interesting because I feel very well educated through health classes and so on, so it was shocking to me that I probably could not pass the survey if it were a test.