The research skills brought to bear on Lifelong Psychology formed the basis of my enthusiasm for the course’s recommendation by my TCC advisor.  The reason I changed majors from criminology to sociology and then to Literature pertain to old age, but the decision complicates my achievement at TCC due to most of my requirements for the degree transferring from my former school in Pittsburgh CCAC from where I hold a General Studies Associates.  TCC is a unique and precious experience, after this my academic pursuits will end. The Literature department is very fine, so I began looking for a way to give TCC identity to my literary shopkeep. This project allows me to address this critical desire to fulfill by commentary the distinctive flare of my school in which my achievements are noted.

      The research articles I have chosen illustrate the meaningful contribution to rational digest arriving with Lifelong Psychology and attending research standards and methods because of the multiple lens provided by database study.  To show the point I am making I selected from Academic Search Engines - Corporal Punishment (ie. affecting) Deaf Children, and being able to only find one, a data intensive, non-interpretative, dry investigation, looked for complementary works about the Deaf of an ethnographic character.   The data is so carefully conscribed to ward off unknowns that no picture of the deaf community emerges in the effort at all, only information. While it is good to know some facts about the impact of childhood corporal punishment on later life mental health problems experienced by the deaf, the article does not make for especially vibrant reading, excepting in the admiration its scrupulous cautions evoke.   It does not pretend to be offering interpretation, quite to the contrary. It is providing the service of detail.

         When observations are scrupulously policed by data and assessment that is heavily qualified as unproved no matter how supportable the data may make such readings or judgment calls, the style of unbiased research begins to take on the tone of a ward against common sense, or at least it might seem that ways to someone not disciplined to the trade.  Misinterpretation is prevented by barring interpretation of any sort whatsoever in this case to some extent. This is a hallmark of the discipline and worthy of appreciation.

        Having found no research studies on corporal punishment that give picturesque to the ethnographic milieu of children in a deaf community where corporal punishment is used, I crossed the psychological field to recruit more descriptive research narrative about diagnosis, and misdiagnosis, of autism among the deaf community.   Immediately, you see the problem through the obvious absence of information about corporal punishment, however equally obvious the call for further research would be. Do misunderstandings about the cause of behavior that seems unsatisfactory originate in misperceptions about deaf children, perhaps originating in undiagnosed or misdiagnosed autism?   Clearly, it is a challenging proposal for consideration concerning incidents that seem to call for corporal punishment in the mind of those who do not oppose its use. Widening the parameters of this assignment to give defining viewpoint to a call for research also invites reflection on the real purpose of study: the pyramid rises of wish fulfillment in academic achievement at TCC specifically, the place of Lifelong Psychology Research in a Literature Program.  I will argue that psychological research standards of peer-review and objective, unbiased data, are a scrupulous and meaningful point of departure for academic literature, even experimental academic literature.

         Academic literature is full of interpretation.  Not everyone’s favorite recreational reading, it is mine, but literature itself can thwart data.   A crusty old correspondent for Collier’s Magazine disavowed her marriage to Ernest Hemingway over the dispute.  There’s no question of his power, nor the great reach of his prose, but Martha Gellhorn went crazy reading Hemingway, saying, but I was there, too, this didn't happen.  He was a great writer but not my mentor the way she was, I want to stick to facts, but I am also interested in plausible interpretation, rendering Conversational Modules for example based on definitive scenarios (misinterpreting the deaf community, for good example) before constructing dialogue, or if you have dialogue, putting together its context in reality rather than fantasy or history-as-fiction.   It's all just a heads up, but it's important to me.

      My first course in Honors was in History which led to a study that one of my Lifelong Psychology teachers, Dr. Steffi Schrepfer is interested in, that of Weimar radio and culture.  I became curious because of the bad press they get having failed to thwart the rise of the Third Reich. They gave up under terror in 1931 which was too soon if you look at what Gellhorn did, ran from the Roosevelt White House to Franco's Spain to provide cheering to the resistance and taunts to the assassins (Come ahead, Adolf, Colliers), but parted ways with Hemingway over his embellishments.  When school put me in Psychological research to learn the fact-finding limitations of the field, despite the heads up about fact-based original research, there is dialectic back and forth between academic writing as interpretation that refers back to the dialectics of another course, that of Philosophy.  This problem gets grueling in something like JFK lore because of the outright fantasy involved on the part of not just fiction accounts, Libra by Don DeLillo, for example, but also on the part of historians getting away with fiction, whether sincere or saccharine.

     When we turn to the second, psychology, peer-reviewed article, on autism, we begin to see my attempt at framing inclusive literary inflected meta-analysis.  The purpose of recruiting an adjacent area of what may illustrate misfortune for a deaf child is to give more suitable picturesque to the data that is fact-based, as well, in order to render the terrain as faithfully as possible, conscripted by the data, but warned off by the restrictive caretaker approach used by masters in the field.

        When the data suggests some confirming and plausible suspicions, that physical punishment in children can disorder the life of the student  is known, but what can it explain about the circumstances in which such punishment takes place without research? Psychology would restrict us to proposing further research.   Hemingway might take the ball and run the wrong direction to heartfelt applause. I’m suggesting that once the parameter is clear, the ability to enrich the literature about the problem exists without necessarily violating ethics, so that Psychological research can be a proud integral to literary voyayas.   The prospect, not clearly defined, of a deaf child being humiliated and subject to psychiatric institutionalization because of misdiagnosis is the subject of a work of fiction as a work of art called: And Your Name is Jonah.  It does not defeat the purpose of psychological research entirely for being fiction because it’s theme is not far-fetched.  I am not, however, suggesting that fiction is my literary objective.

         Therefore a very poignant and personally very sweet observation settles in taking the form of a question about my personal education:  Can fact-based psychology provide modeling in academic literature? Whether the form is in persuading professionals to take on the next study for data-based research or to provide energy to images that have veracity as a form of expressive society and art, for example constructing Conversational Models before dialogue based on established conflict zones, such as a deaf child being punished while his autism isn’t clear, or providing factual background to dialogue that may exist objectively that is endowed with the plumbing of myth, we arrive back at the foundational defense of conflict that protects society and schools which is rooted in Philosophy.

        Norman Melchert writes, in the TCC used textbook, The Great Conversation, “Dialectic is the somewhat paradoxically cooperative enterprise in which each assists the others by raising objections to what others say.”  (Emphasis in original, p. 65).   Disagreement on key issues is a form of philosophical mandate.  In other words, academic disagreement is in situ (in its place) at school.   The psychological research directive to remain unbiased, in other words, provides professional scaffolding to the lifelong direction of literary appraisal.  Inaccurate ideas inhibit academic literature as surely as smears obscure visibility. Translucence in art can devolve into narrative power at the expense of true understanding, a fact at the root of the Hemingway-Gellhorn dispute, if not really the cause of their divorce.

        The seemingly improper intrusion of judgment-based framing of data cannot always be avoided, so empowering the respect for objective facts that Psychological Research standards provide can keep us in the realm of academic validity and prevent the sophistry that threatens so much of our institution’s welfare politically, now as occurred under Weimar.  This isn’t to say that embellishment and invention can co-exist happily with Psychological Research, but rather to announce the agency of respectable and gainful configuration of the gray areas by cautious and plausible verbalization of what seems reasonable to suppose.