In the Issue Analysis Paper, you choose a topic, issue or subject relating to sports psychology, and you are to analyze the topic in the first half of the paper.

First, identify an important issue related to sport psychology and describe that issue in detail during the first half of the paper. Then, in the paper’s second half, analyze the issue and suggest solutions. Analysis requires breaking a subject, issue, or event into its constituent elements so that the assumptions or components are made clear and the relationships between them are made explicit.

Thus, through the analysis paper, the student demonstrates comprehension of the material being analyzed. In that Sport Psychology is interdisciplinary, you can borrow topics and subjects from other areas in which you have an interest, but we must be sure the topic relates to sports psychology.

Issues can include mental or physical conditions, performance, goal-setting and imagery, aggression and violence, group processes, competition, etc. The paper is not a personal opinion or reflection style paper. As such, it should NOT include personal stories or observation sharing, but must analyze the issue; the personal, you or I, must be left out of your thinking and writing. You should write in 3rd person point of view (the most objective and analytical), as though your readers are intelligent but not fully informed about the topic.

Your paper must be developed using research material from at least five sources. You may also use the Internet for some of your material as long as you access scholarly resources and not popular media such as Sports Illustrated, Psychology Today, opinion .com sites or blogs, About.com sites or others that do summarizing for readers, abstracts without reading the full article, etc. NO WIKIPEDIA articles may be used for these papers or any other writing assignment in this course.

All sources must be listed on “References” pages (not “Works Cited” or “Bibliography” – those aren’t APA format terms, and without the quotation marks) attached to the end of the papers.

You must also cite the material within the body of your paper, using the American Psychological Association (APA) format.
Your paper should contain a cover page with your name and the title. Papers are to be typed and double-spaced using a font size of 10 to 12, no larger, throughout, including the cover page. The pages should be full and margins should be no larger than 1″ on all sides. The cover page and “References” page are in addition to the five-page length requirement.