By the time you complete this final assignment, you will have gained a lot more knowledge and insights about your interests in psychology and your career trajectory. To begin this assignment, take some time to reflect on all you have learned about the field and ways you can contribute to psychology.

What aspects of your research affected your vision or goals? Given this, what topics do you think you would be interested in researching in the future?

How was your vision affected by the career information in your readings from your Career Paths in Psychology text and your exploration of the Career Center and other resources?

Revise and refine the vision statement and long-term goals that you developed earlier in response to the feedback you have received and your studies in this course. Update your Articulating Your Purpose activity to help support these revisions.

Professional Competencies and Requirements

Understanding the competencies and responsibilities involved with your future career in psychology is essential for preparing yourself to become a practitioner-scholar in your field. It is also necessary to understand any requirements needed for your specialized practice and scholarship.

For this step in the assignment, analyze the competencies, responsibilities, ethical considerations, and other requirements needed for achieving your vision and goals as a professional in psychology. These may include:

Capella program and specialization requirements.

Skills, abilities, and attitudes critical to success in the field of psychology, such as those related to critical thinking, decision making, problem solving, evidence-based practices, ethical integrity, cultural competence, and conflict resolution.

Make note of skills, abilities, and attitudes related to the practitioner-scholar model and the experience you had in researching scholarly sources in your last assignment.

Credentialing, certification, licensure, and accreditation practices and standards.

Ethical codes, principles, laws, and policies applicable to your chosen career path.

Self-Assessment

Reflect on your current competencies, previous experiences, and achievements that help you meet those requirements. Since you are at the beginning of your journey to a future career, you will have gaps in required knowledge, skills, attitudes, and credentials. Identify any areas in which you need further development to achieve your goals and vision as a psychology practitioner-scholar.

Action Plan

With all this knowledge of your vision and goals, and the competencies and requirements for the field in hand, you are ready to plot your course to making these aspirations a reality. The final step in this assignment is to create a revised action plan to achieve your goals. This means translating the requirements for your profession and the development areas you identified into specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timed (SMART) steps to achieve your vision.

Include these elements in your action plan:

Completion of your Capella program.

Possible opportunities for additional training or volunteer work to address gaps in your knowledge or skills.

Possible opportunities in your current position to develop additional skills through coaching or stretch assignments.

Capella Community groups and professional organizations that you could join for networking with others and completing additional informational interviews.

How you will stay current with the research and literature in the field..

How you can apply what you have learned in this course about researching psychological literature and evaluating it in terms of reliability, credibility, ethics, and value.

How you will apply critical thinking and effective decision making as a psychologist.

How you will use Capella’s support resources to develop the skills required to successfully develop your writing and other competencies essential to the profession and your role as a graduate learner.

At this point, there may be an overwhelming number of steps that you could complete to work toward your vision. If it helps you work through this plan, focus on major milestones and requirements as well as steps you can take during your Capella degree program to help translate your vision into SMART short-term goals and tasks.

If you feel the need for more input, review the SMART Goals presentation and Career Center resources or search the Capella library or the Internet for additional reflective exercises and inspiring ideas about transforming your vision into an action plan.

Additional Requirements

Your assignment should also meet the following requirements:

Template: Use the Your Career in Psychology Template to format your assignment.

Length: 7–9 typed and double-spaced content pages in Times New Roman 12-point font. The title page, abstract, and reference list are not included in this length.

References: Include a minimum of five references with at least three of them from course readings. Your references may include both scholarly literature and practitioner sources. All references need to be cited in-text, according to current APA standards, and listed in the reference list. Remember that citations are to support your thoughts, not take the place of them!

Written communication: Must be clear, with correct spelling, grammar, and syntax and with good organization.

Writing style: APA expectations for scholarly writing include the use of third-person narrative, unless it is awkward to do so. However, because you are talking about yourself in this paper, you may write in the first person.

APA formatting: Must be formatted according to APA style and formatting and include a title page, abstract, and reference list. Note that these three elements are not counted toward the length of your assignment.

Assess the development of societal standards in relation to social media and how this can alter social norms in everyday life.

Instructions

The prevalence of social media has had a huge impact on society in the area of how we tend to relate to each other and on what is considered to be normal in general. Taking a look at the ways in which social media changes attitudes and “norms” makes for an interesting study, and one that is applicable to understanding how society is slowly changing over time.

For this assignment, you will first conduct your own research on the effects of social media on societal norms (Part 1), then you will examine what has been found through previous research conducted by others (Part 2).

Part 1:

Compare and contrast the attitudes of two cohorts of people; one that consists of five people that rarely use social media and one cohort of five people that uses social media 2 or more hours a day.

Create a list of five people that you know that use social media at least 2 or more hours per day. This group of people will make up your first cohort. Then create a list of five people that you know that either do not use social media or use it very rarely. Take into account age when creating the cohorts, and try to keep the ages as similar as possible between the cohorts. Keeping a certain level of consistency in the two cohorts will help to negate the potential effects of generational differences. Provide a brief description of each of the ten people you are going to interview divided into their respective cohorts.

In other words, list the five people in the social media at least 2 or more hours a day, and provide a brief description of each along with why you chose them. Then provide a list of the five people that rarely or never use social media, and provide a brief description of each along with why you chose them.

Interview the participants to learn the similarities and differences between the two cohorts as it relates to attitudes, lifestyles, and relationships. Write a two-page paper comparing and contrasting what you learned about the two cohorts. Be sure to relate your findings to cultivation theory and socialization theory in the paper.

Part 2:

Now you will compare your research with research findings through previous research conducted by others. Look up at least 3 articles that relate to the topic of social media and its impact on society. You are not limited to articles that are strictly written on the specific topic of social media and norms. Articles that are covering social media and society are available from a wide number of angles. After studying these articles, write a two-page paper on what you learned on the topic of social media and its potential impact on societal attitudes, customs, and norms.