EPQ help

[RyukShad0w]

Hey guys so I’m doing my epq on the topic ‘To what extent do traumatic childhood events have an effect on the behaviour of serial killers?’ Does anyone have any tips / advice / help on how to start write the actual essay and on how to structure it or have their own social science or psychology epq they can send for guidance as my school isn’t much help thank you

What are you stuck on? Have you done your research and reading?

Try googling EPQ guidance or EPQ structure or EPQ research (or you could use academic essay instead of EPQ).

Here are a couple of links to get you started:

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/connect/teachers/students/widening-participation/post-16/extended-project/resources/

https://thelakesschool.com/the-lakes-school-cumbria/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/EPQ-Guidance-Booklet-compressed.pdf

The academic word bank is another useful resource:

https://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/

All the current threads about making students not answering the question in exams made me think of you and your EPQ 😂

You've set yourself quite a difficult question so make sure you answer it! ‘To what extent do traumatic childhood events have an effect on the behaviour of serial killers?’ Don't get sidetracked and write too much about the link between childhood trauma and serial killers. That's not the question you've asked. Although it is something you should touch on in your essay.
http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Research%20-%20Forensic/2005%2020-1-Mitchell-40-47.pdf

You need to be looking at how the behaviour of serial killers who have not suffered traumatic childhood events and serial killers have not suffered traumatic childhood events differs, and whether/how different types of childhood trauma affect the behaviour of serial killers (or not). You could also consider whether other factors are more important.

I'm assuming you've already searched the relevant databases and done your reading but this is a recent paper on the subject that might interest you:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7144278/

It's often helpful to look at the references in papers to see if there are useful papers that you haven't come across and read already.

Do you know how to critically analyse papers? The second link is a bit above your level but you should be able to understand it!

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=64126&section=1

Good luck!

That is quite a tricky topic? Do you have source materials (books/papers/websites) that you will use as research materials to investigate this?

The list of what sources you used is pretty important in the EPQ.

I lead EPQ in my school and whilst I am happy to give you some guidance, that is really the job of your supervisor.

I advise my students to research in a smart fashion: use Google Scholar rather than normal Google and if you have to start with Wikipedia, look at the references in the articles and go to them. Does your school/college have a subscription to JSTOR? When you find articles of interest, keep a hyperlink to them along with the date you accessed it, then summarise the main argument in a sentence or two. With your title, you will need to develop both sides of the argument as @Diospyros states so work out which side each article or research piece fits with. If you keep your notes for each side together, it will help with the writing up.

The EPQ I use suggests around 5000 words. I generally advise on 500 for the introduction and conclusion, then 1500 for each of the (normally 3) main points. So yours could be 1500 on trauma playing a part, 1500 on it not, and 1500 maybe on other childhood influences, or the like. Obviously tweak these, so if your argument is much stronger for the first, give yourself more words. I then suggest they write their opening paragraph for each point, more if they feel they can. When they know where they are going, I suggest they write their introduction. Use that to signpost your argument. Make sure your conclusion follows on from your essay: if you have loads of evidence of trauma being important, make sure your conclusion states it. Make sure you choose a referencing style and stick to it. Mine all use Word to type it up and it will do the referencing for you. Don't forget to keep saving your work!

Finally, you need to analyse your sources, ideally as you are going along. If you rely heavily on a disreputable source, you weaken your argument.

I would also ask someone other than your supervisor to read it once you have finished it. Lots of mine ask a parent or if it's on a subject that school staff know well, they ask them. It's always good to get another perspective.

Hope that helps. Feel free to tag me again if you need more advice.

Don't forget that your actual question can be adapted as you go along, if you find that your first question is too big, or one aspect of your work seems more important, then rewriting a question that you can produce a meaningful piece of work on is extremely valuable.

My niece got A* on a psychology based EPQ a couple of years ago, and I recall that she was originally planning to consider several people in it, but ultimately reduced her question to a case study of a single person which was far more achievable in the scope of the project. I see some similarities in your question to what she worked on, so really think about what information you are finding in your research so you don't get caught up with "I need to find out X but can't find it". Use your question as a starting point by all means, but your final title could conceivably be "prevalence of childhood event X in serial killers" or, "X Y - the making of a serial killer; an analysis of the impact of childhood trauma" if you went for a case study.

Good luck. I think the EPQ is very valuable, but it is not easy to do well without good support. One of my own children did a fairly good one, but her school's timeline for it was poorly communicated to parents and in my opinion inappropriately short. The other started an EPQ at a school that had only recently started doing it, and it wasn't the best use of time in the end.

Thank you this is very helpful by chance do you think you could share your niece’s one if possible as many EPQ examples are unrequited to psychology so this would be great to look at as an example if not it’s ok xx

Thank you so much this is very helpful as my supervisor and my school have not provided much information and have left it all to us also my school does not have a JSTOR account does that mean I can still access things or will I be limited ?

@RyukShad0w it's really not good form to ask people to send you another person's EPQ. This is the second time, you asked a poster on another thread. Nobody is going to send a stranger their own work as they risk having it stolen! Possibly even sold online... Letting someone copy your work is just as serious an academic misdemeanour as plagiarising someone else's work.

I'm sure that's not your plan but you shouldn't ask for that reason!

There are exemplar psychology EPQ's online, if you search. It would be far more useful to search for advice on how to structure a psychology EPQ. How you structure your EPQ really depends on your subject, question/hypothesis etc The structure of GrassWillBeGreener's niece's EPQ would not fit with your research question so it wouldn't help you much.

Your subject matter might lend itself to something called a literature review, where you look at all the studies on a topic to give an overview of the subject and critically evaluate them. You can find lots of advice online on how to write a literature review.

It sounds like you haven't started yet so maybe start with researching databases like JSTOR, PubMed etc to find relevant studies and read around the subject before you start thinking about structure. As GrassWillBeGreener suggested, you may decide to refine your question. You can access a lot of things on JSTOR for free. PsycARTICLES, PsycINFO and PsychSource are psychology databases.

Good luck!

You realise only about 20% of the grade is the writeup, skill development, planning, use of resources and review/Eval are also all about 20%.

On the subject of refining a question, I often suggest mine signpost that in their introduction. Last year someone was researching technical innovations in business. In his introduction he mentioned lots of ways in which technology helped then stated that for the purpose of this essay, he would focus on three of them: A, B and C. Otherwise he could end up with 50k words, not something I have the time or inclination to read.