Assignment 2: Police Psychology Web Resources

As you continue your course on Police Psychology, it is important to develop an understanding of the literature and resources that are available to police psychology professionals, particularly electronic resources that can be utilized during this course and in your future work. In order to help you develop this understanding, this assignment will serve five objectives:

• Develop your skills in conducting electronic data–based searches relevant to police psychology.
• Develop your ability in summarizing and paraphrasing information from police psychology resources.
• Develop your skills in critically analyzing the merits—the strengths, weaknesses, scholarly attributes, and potential utility—of electronic resources.
• Develop your skills further in writing properly formatted in-text citations and references for electronic resources.
• Develop a set of resources for your future professional work.

Search the Internet to locate at least six police psychology web resources that would be useful to a police psychology professional's practice. You may include peer-reviewed websites as well as peer-reviewed articles. Your web resources should be selected based on the following:

• Provide information regarding the practice of police psychology.
• Cover each of the following areas of police psychology (i.e., one site or article for each identified area):
  1. Mental health involvement in critical incidents (e.g., hostage negotiations and natural disasters)
  2. Pre-employment evaluations
  3. Fitness-for-duty evaluations
  4. Provision of clinical treatment to police officers
  5. Interviewing, interrogation techniques, or polygraph testing
  6. Ethical issues when conducting police psychological work
• Contain peer-reviewed information, sponsored by a reputable scholarly organization.

After locating your sources, create a 3- to 4-page Word document containing the following:

• References to at least six web resources
• A summary or paraphrased description of each resource
• Evaluation of the merits of each resource as it pertains to police psychology

For this assignment, you should avoid the use of quoted material. Challenge yourself to paraphrase (i.e., place in your own words) the information you find from the web resources. Also, you should rely on sites hosted by organizations (.org), educational institutions (.edu), and governmental agencies (.gov), instead of commercial (for-profit or .com) sites.

Be sure to apply current APA standards for editorial style; expression of ideas; and formatting of text, citations, and references. You are encouraged to review information that can be found on APA-style formatting in the Publication Manual American Psychological Association (6th edition). You will find information on citations on pages 174–179. Information on formatting of references starts on page 180, and a discussion of formatting electronic references begins on page 187. In addition, you can also review helpful resources on formatting in the Argosy library: http://literati.credoreference.com.libproxy.edmc.edu/

If you need a more general review of APA style, go to this link sponsored by the American Psychological Association: apastyle.org/. The site has a great deal of information on how to write in APA format. On the Publication Manual tab, you will find a link to a tutorial called "The Basics of APA Style." This short but informative tutorial addresses major topics in style and formatting that you need to follow. The tutorial contains a sample paper, where you can review proper formatting of citations and references of all kinds.

Submission Details:

• Save your paper as M2_A2_Lastname_Firstname.doc. By the due date assigned, post it to the Submissions Area.