Lived experiences of gender and social psychology research

Part 1: Essay Lived experiences of gender have changed radically in the last two decades. Discuss this statement by critically evaluating how social psychology research can best take account of such changes. In writing your answer, your essay must, a) make use of module theme 6 (a contemporary subject, specific to contemporary contexts), and b) include and discuss one academic source you have independently found that is relevant to the essay (mark this with an asterisk in the references section). Word limit: 1,500 words (excluding the assignment title and references).Student notes: Step-by-Step Guide to writing the TMA 04 essay Step 1: Understanding the task and the question For Part 1 of this assignment, you are asked to draw on module material from Block 4, to discuss the statement that lived experiences of gender have changed radically over the past two decades. Just as for TMA 02, you do need an element of description and explanation to set up your essay, but critical evaluation is the key task. This is explained in Chapter 3, Part 5 of Book 1 and the related VLE material. Another requirement of TMA 04 is that you need to make use of at least one of the module themes in your essay. Reflecting on module theme 6 helps you form your ideas for critical discussion. From the very beginning of DD317 you have encountered the module themes. They are the main critical ideas running throughout the module, and they crop up recurrently. Because of this they can also serve as structuring devices that help you develop your critical thinking. Theme 6 draws attention to the idea that peoples subjectivity can take particular forms associated with specific societal contexts. So, in light of Theme 6 you might explore how social psychology research has responded to changes in lived experiences of gender? To see what such changes are you might ask yourself questions like: To what extent are experiences of gender shaped by societal context? How might that context (or those contexts) have changed over the last two decades? What aspects of the context may have changed (think of e.g. use of social media? Commonly used terms? How we talk about gender? Wider political issues?). Have the constraints on gender changed? There is much scope here to critically evaluate how social psychology theory and research in this area relates to and helps us understand these more recent developments. For example, how has past research (e.g. that presented in the module material, which was authored nearly a decade ago) responded to changes in the past, and does it still provide good theories and approaches to engage with more recent developments? And looking at more recent research literature (which you are required to do for TMA 04), do psychologists pay enough attention to these changes in contemporary context when they set out to study gender? Recently, questions of gender have become intensely political and personal for some. Please approach the topic with sensitivity and respect. Importantly, and as for all TMA essays, you are required to write an academic essay, explicitly drawing on, weighing up and critically evaluating research evidence (from module material and independently sourced). This means there is no room for personal opinion, polarisation or speculation. TMA 04 also requires that you conduct your own literature search to select one academic source from beyond the module materials (e.g. a journal article or other academic output; see below). You must explicitly draw on and critically evaluate this independently found academic source within your essay (and flag it with an asterisk in your reference section). So, merely adding an in-text reference to an independently sourced research paper is not sufficient. Step 2: Reviewing relevant module material The essay in TMA 04 has a focus on module material in Block 4, which is entitled Contemporary Social Psychological Subjects. You need to review this material carefully. The question opens up a number of different possible topics, discussions and arguments. You have only 1,500 words for your answer, so you will need to be focused and selective when choosing what material/examples to draw on. Material to draw on: The Section Introduction of Book 2 is a good starting point. The entire block is relevant, but particularly important is Chapter 11 (New femininities and masculinities). This chapter and the related VLE material deal directly with the social psychology of gender as it stood about 10 years ago. You should start by familiarising yourself with this material before you search for your external source (see below), because this will give you a clear sense of the kind of issue or topic you may want to focus on to answer the essay question; and this in turn will inform your search for recent research on the topic you decide to focus on to construct your argument. You will notice that Chapter 11 places its emphasis on changing and new ways of making sense of gender, taking account of changed that happened 1520 years ago. So, you can reflect on how it accounts for those long-past changes, but engaging with it now, you can also view it in the context of more recent changed in the lived experience of gender (i.e. over the past 5 years), and consider whether this older research from the module material might still apply to those very recent changes, or whether much more recent research does this better. You might construct your essay around discussing how well past approaches are able to engage with and explain these more recent developments, or what alternative research has emerged and in how far this is more apt in engaging with issues around gender today. There might be a continuum, with past approaches still being useful or having evolved to help explain more recent issues, or you might argue that some of the past approaches are not useful anymore and point to new research. The introduction of Chapter 11 sets the theme that understandings of gender can change (hence the chapter title new femininities and masculinities) and sets up key concepts like essentialism and hegemony (hegemony is further discussed in section 3), which remain important. Further, Chapter 11 Section 2 introduces the concept of common-sense ideas about gender. Likewise, Section 4 develops the theory that gender is something that is enacted or done as distinct from something a person is. Exploring these concepts and approaches within the module material, will allow you to develop a sense of how you want to answer the essay question and what additional recent research you might want to look for. Section 5 of Chapter 11 New femininities and masculinities deals with empowerment and consumption, also examining issues of sexuality, and these may also have been influenced by changing contexts. Of course you may find that there are continuities with the past. For example, for contexts it may also be useful to look back to the Block 4 introduction in the textbook. You will also find relevant material in the Block 4 study weeks in the online study guide. Most directly relevant is the material in Week 19. Doing the activities in Section 2 New femininities and masculinities will help you make sense of your own position on the question and to reflect upon the key concepts. The interview with Ros Gill in Section 3 of study week 19 encourages thinking about the complexity of gender as well as its changing nature. You may consider following up the work Ros Gill has done more recently, or that of Meg-Jon Barker who is mentioned in Section 4. At the end of Book 2 you will find a number of relevant glossary entries, including an entry on Gender (but also potentially relevant entries on Subjectivity, Hegemony, The Other, Power/knowledge etc.). Module themes are first introduced in Section 2 of Chapter 1 and they feature in various activities throughout the module. By the end of step 2, you should have a set of notes marking out which topics and examples to include as relevant to the question, and where in the module material you can find them. Step 3: Searching for academic sources For TMA 04 Part 1 you need to do your own literature search to independently find, select and critically evaluate one academic source relevant to the argument you chose to make in your essay. That academic source must be: relevant to the argument you make in your answer explicitly reviewed and critically evaluated as part of your essay (alongside module material you decide to include) referenced appropriately within text and in your reference section (marked with an asterisk) published within the last 10 years (counting back from your deadline) it must not be a reference cited within the module materials. You were introduced to searching for relevant academic sources as part of your independent study in Week 2 Section 4, and for TMA 02 you were required to find two sources. For your search for TMA 04 you should ideally use the Open University library. Search terms can include concepts you want to focus on, names of authors you have encountered in the Block 4 module material or other work by authors who are cited. Collate and review a number of papers by first reading the abstracts. You can then draw up a short list of the most promising ones and read those in full. Try and settle for the paper you want to include before starting to write the essay as it will guide how your argument is set up. Step 4: Deciding the focus of your essay To shape your focus and argument you need to think about what your position is on the stated question. There is no one correct position or way of approaching this essay but, to reiterate a point made above, working with theme 6 should allow you to step back and see the bigger picture of changing sense-making about gender. In deciding your focus, you should carefully consider how best to use your independently selected academic source and what it adds to the relevant module materials. For example, is it a journal article that grapples with contemporary debates about gender in a way past approaches cannot? Is it an example of an approach to gender that draws your criticism because it ignores something you think past research did include, or that is entirely new? Or is it an approach that continues a past approach, further developing a method/topic that has been looked at in the past? Research and phenomena in this field are very complex, so there is no one correct conclusion and position to the question. Still, it is important that you critically evaluate the research and arrive at a clear sense of what your position is, during the planning process. Then you can plan your essay to coherently argue your position, making sure you draw on your critical evaluation of the research evidence to support your conclusion. By the end of this process of reflection, you will be ready to bring together your ideas about the best focus for your essay. Step 5: Planning the structure of your essay Once you have settled for your position and argument, you can create a brief sketch of your essay, setting out the structure (e.g. one short bullet-point describing the content of each paragraph, the point it makes and the material it draws on). As ever, your essay needs to be well organised into paragraphs, with a separate introduction and conclusion. Furthermore, the structure of your essay needs to be coherent: the paragraphs should follow logically one from another, so as to clearly express the core argument you are building. Decide on what research evidence you want to draw on, how you evaluate it, and how you are going to use it to create a clear argument around your position. Step 6: Writing your essay Based on the sketch you created in step 5 you can now write the essay. If you found this approach helpful in previous essays, you can again start by writing an introduction to guide your further progress and to make sure you keep a good focus on the question as set. As ever, make sure that you write in your own words and that you do not copy phrases and explanations verbatim from the module material or other literature. Also, you need to reference correctly where you refer to module material or externally sourced research papers. This is a good time to reread the feedback you received from your tutor for the TMA 01 and the TMA 02 essay. Step 7: Checking and polishing After you have finished writing we recommend that you put the essay aside for a bit rather than submit it immediately. Before submitting TMA 04, you might find it helpful to have a go at editing your essay by using the guidelines provided in Section 3 of Study Week 20, entitled Editing your own work Part 2: Collaborative independent study Part 2 evaluates your collaborative independent study. In Block 1 you were asked to keep an Independent Study Notebook, including definitions of new terms and any useful new sources (articles, websites etc.) that you have independently identified. In TMA 02 you were asked to independently find two sources, and from Block 2 onwards you have engaged in a collaborative activity that involved: sharing some of these sources and glossary definitions with other students in the forum and commenting on other students posts of sources and glossary definitions. For Part 2 of TMA 04 you are asked to provide evidence of your engagement in these tasks by producing a short document which includes: copies of three of the sources and two of the glossary definitions you have posted as evidence of your engagement in the collaborative activity. You can for example add a screenshot that clearly displays your contributions (worth 5% of the total mark for this TMA) copies of some of your own feedback on other students posts; again, adding a screenshot is fine (worth 10% of the total mark) a brief discussion of how your engagement with the posts, including giving and receiving feedback, has contributed to your understanding of the module material (worth 15% of the total mark). Word limit: 500 words (note that only the third part, the discussion, is counted in the word count).