← Back to the Introduction to Psychology outline The Course Maker
← Introduction to Psychology outline
Week 15 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 15 — How Do We Know Care Helps? Reasoning About Disorders Without Labeling Anyone — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Psychology Free sample edition
Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 14 of the term, and the last one — count the checks behind the three D's, read three composite scenes in context, plan the experiment that shows whether a therapy helps, choose the right research design, and explain to a friend, without labeling anyone, how we know therapy works.

This week you learned how psychologists judge whether a struggle may be a psychological disorder, how the DSM-5-TR classifies conditions rather than people, why the diathesis–stress model treats a disorder as a health condition and not a weakness, and how therapies are matched to their core ideas and tested. In Week 1 you met the biopsychosocial model, and in Week 2 you learned what an experiment can claim that a correlation cannot; this assignment applies both. You work two short problems, interpret each one, choose a research design, and explain to someone who has never studied psychology how we know therapy helps. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Analysis Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

This week you checked three composite scenes, built for this course, for the three D's: distress (the person's own suffering), dysfunction, and deviance. A runner trains before sunrise six days a week and loves it. A student cries most evenings in the weeks after a grandparent dies and misses two days of class. A commuter has had sudden waves of pounding-heart fear on the bus for months, walks an hour to avoid it, and has started missing shifts. You also saw how researchers test a therapy: volunteers are randomly assigned to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or to a waitlist control group, and the outcome is the number of bus rides taken in a week. No real person is described anywhere in this assignment, and nobody is diagnosed.

Work these two problems, showing your arithmetic:

  1. Three composite scenes are each checked for all three D's. How many checks is that?
  2. A study of CBT for a fear of riding the bus randomly assigns 80 volunteers in equal numbers to CBT or a waitlist control group. How many volunteers are in each group?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation and one limit. For problem 1, say which scene meets all three D's with no context to explain it away, explain why the runner and the grieving student are not disorders, and state the commuter's pattern as a category reading in person-first language, never as a diagnosis. For problem 2, name the independent variable (IV) and the dependent variable (DV), and explain why random assignment to a waitlist control group lets a difference in rides be traced to the therapy.

Choose the procedure

This is the last assignment of the course, so it asks you to pull the research toolkit together. A friend asks, "Does therapy actually work, or do people only feel better with time?" Three ways to look into it come from earlier weeks: a case study of one person who went to therapy, a correlational study that surveys people about whether they saw a therapist and how they feel now, and an experiment with random assignment to a therapy or a waitlist control group. Choose the one that can answer your friend's question, justify the choice from what each design is allowed to conclude, and say why one plausible alternative fits less well.

Explain it to a non-expert

Write a 3–5 sentence message to that friend, who has never studied psychology. In everyday words, explain how researchers know whether a therapy such as CBT helps, why people feeling better over time is not enough on its own, and one limit: a study shows what happens on average across many people, so it cannot promise how therapy will go for one person. Explain any technical term in everyday words, use person-first language, and do not label or diagnose anyone, including yourself.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who says a new sleep app "works" because three people on the team slept better after downloading it. Model answer: "Three people sleeping better is a good story, but it can't tell us the app did it. Maybe the busy season ended, or they started going to bed earlier anyway. To know, you'd want a group that uses the app and a similar group that doesn't, chosen by chance, and then compare. Even then, the result tells you what happens on average, not what will happen for you."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own explanation and evidence.

Looking ahead to the final. The final exam comes in Week 16, finals week. To prepare, use the Final study guide, the Final Practice Exam, and the exam-prep tutorial in the finals-week module. The choose-the-design skill you practise here, matching a question to the research design that can answer it, is the skill those materials ask you to use across the whole course.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

If you or someone you know is struggling, you do not have to handle it alone. Your campus counseling or health center, or a health professional you trust, is a good place to start. In the United States, you can also call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at any hour.

Deliverables

Submit a single brief containing:

  • the two answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation and one limit;
  • your design choice, with its justification and the reason one plausible alternative fits less well;
  • your message to your friend, explaining in everyday words how researchers know whether a therapy helps, why feeling better over time is not enough on its own, and one limit; and
  • a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your brief as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the two groups in the experiment with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, the design choice, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

Built with The Course Maker · samples.thecoursemaker.com