Hi Elisabeth1,
I made a thread a while back where I was providing Society and Culture assistance. I have attained a band 6 in Society, and so I hope my advice is useful!
So, your topic is about:
parents vs celebrities as role models. Great and orginal topic! If you would like help in narrowing, or sophiscating your topic, PM me
Here is how to recieve a band 6 intro (I have taken this directly from my previous thread)
1. Introduce Your Topic
- It always catches the markers attention when you open up with some sort of social commentary, or a personal experience.
- Immediately introduce your course concepts as best you can. Incorporate them everywhere! Eg. seeing this immbedded within my micro world was extraordinary...
- Introduce your methods. For eg. if ur using personal experience open your intro with that.
- Introduce the aim of your PIP where possible.
Here is a sample of my intro:
Four years ago, when
my mother paraded around the females of the house that my sister “became a woman” the idea that the pad was a symbol of all power and maturity lured me into a false reality and I became deeply envious of my sister’s uterus. Sixty-two periods ago, reality hit me, and my envy disappeared minutes after I saw artistically crafted strokes of red across my underwear, where I ran to my mother excitingly yelling “Mama, I am menstruating”. She smiled, but immediately said that I am deemed “unclean” in the eyes of my religion and culture during this period and read the list of terms that my uterus had come with. Now, sixty-two periods later, I am still told that my body is unclean and I must continue to comply with a list of terms, set not only by my family, and culture, but also society, and the transparent media.
2. Explain why you selected your topic, and why you want to investigate it
- Some personal experience is always great here
Sample:
Menstruation is misconstrued with stigma and taboo represented as a hygiene crisis that needs rigid management, as a shameful secret that must be concealed, and as a constitutive of womanhood in terms of femininity, that evokes fear and disgust. The question of “why” menstruation is conceptualized as such sparked my interest ever since I among many menstruating females, and male transgender’s was made to feel ashamed for menstruating. Furthermore, as a feminist this enraged me, however as a year 12 Society and Culture student it also intrigued me, and I vowed to investigate the taboo and stigmatization of menstruation, and whether this is a reflection of misogyny through my Personal Interest Project, herein referred to as PIP.
3. Identify your hypothesis, what you are researching, and what you think will happen.
Sample:
As I reflected on my experience of “maturity”, I hypothesized that menstruation is considered a taboo and a social stigma because of its positioning, misrepresentation and silencing within education, culture, popular culture as well as misogyny. I also hypothesize that environments, ethnicity, gender and socio-economic status will cause distinctions between attitudes, and the degree of stigmatization and taboo concerning menstruation.
4. Introduce Methods, look at 3-4 METHODS
1. Identify your methods.
2. Why you chose them.
3. 1-2 Adv of them
Sample:
To successfully uncover this, I have combined my primary and secondary data through collecting and reviewing both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The qualitative and quantitative data collected is through interviews, questionnaires/surveys; personal reflection compared with the content analysis of secondary sources. The use of an interview and action research will assist me to gain an insight into the perspectives and attitudes from different individuals, which will contribute to the formation of a cross-cultural perspective. The use of a questionnaire and surveys will allow the collation of statistics, which in turn will allow for simple comparable analysis with qualitative data compiled from content analysis of religious texts, research of others, advertisements and educational booklets. Also, the use of personal reflection will assist the attainment of extensive primary data, allowing me to further understand my own perception, as well as enhance my social and cultural literacy. These methodologies will allow me to gain a deeper understanding of my topic and a determinacy of whether this is indeed an accurate hypothesis.
5. Identifty our cross-cultural components. These are basically how you are researching your topic through different viewpoints. It cannot be the same viewpoint as yours. This can be components such as time, gender, ethnicity, location, culture. YOU MUST HAVE THIS! And then include somewhere on here why is it essential to have this component i.e to investigate changes + continuities, to have opinions different than my own, introduce you to different worldviews to make you a socially and culturaly literate person. Here is somehwere you can address the COMPULSORY change/continuty component of this PIP.
Sample:
The integral cross-cultural components of my PIP are time, gender and culture. Across cultures and time, menstruation is perceived as a taboo and stigma by both genders, however more particularly males. Thus, time, culture and gender are essential cross-cultural components as they demonstrate the similarities as well as the dissimilarities in the perception of menstruation between females and males “of different generations”. The use of this cross-cultural perspective will allow an attainment of valuable opinions that are vastly different from my own. This will also allow me to reflect on the past perceptions of menstruation where I will compare as well as contrast perceptions of menstruation in the present, and comment on any social and cultural continuity or change.
6. Mention how within this PIP, you will improve your social and cultural literacy, or how this PIP will make you a culturally and socially literate person
Sample:
Through comprehensive primary and secondary research, this PIP will effectively augment my social and cultural literacy for it examines the diversification of opinions on this topic. This enlightening PIP journey will make me now more equipped to think constructively and analytically.
Some general suggestions:
- Always use sylabbus terminiology
- Intergrate society and culture concepts wherever possible (I have complied a list of all concepts along with their definitions, if you would like that)
- USE ALL OF YOUR METHODS
- Ensure your writing style is consistent
- When using secondary resources, ensure you collate them from web engines such as Google Scholar etc and not from any website as the information there may be biased or fallacious
- Re-read over your work - let others read it
- Ensure you are culturally senstive and respectful
- Respect anonymity, and refrain from leading your participants to the answer. Your results will be inconclusive.
