Final Project
The American Psychological Association established the Disaster Response Network (DRN) in 1992 to provide free mental health services to individuals who experience disasters. They work in conjunction with the Red Cross, and have provided thousands of hours of services in several major disasters. You can find information about the DRN and its relationships with other organizations by going to the APA website and searching for DRN.
Based on what you have learned in this course and on what you’ve found out about the DRN, write a 1500-word academic paper, including appropriate references and following APA style, that presents your analysis as it would apply to a disaster scenario of your choice from the all-hazards homeland security mission space.
Develop the scenario.
Apply DRN information and procedures to the scenario, assessing DRN’s effectiveness in handling multiple facets of the psychological response to a disaster.
In particular, assess the likely effectiveness of DRN in:
Anticipating and preparing for your disaster scenario, based on the concept of preparedness as a state of mind.
Supporting first responders (including but in no way limited to mental health providers) to your disaster scenario.
Handling conflicts among organizations involved in or responding to your disaster.
Forstering recovery and enhancing resilience.
Provide a conclusion, describing what the DRN has done, and what they still need to do to respond to the challenges you identified and described in regards to your disaster scenario.
Provide recommendations identifying revision needs for guidelines to make the DRN and its capabilities more effective in responding to your disaster scenario.
Your final project paper needs to be presented in the form of a term paper. In particular, your paper needs to:
Be of 1,500 words in overall length.
Include a title page with a title for your paper, a table of contents, an abstract, sub-titles, and a bibliography.
Use a minimum of six articles from peer-reviewed journals. You may use our Homeland Security Research Guide as a starting point.
Use APA style.
Be carefully worded and edited according to common academic standards.
Additional Information
A few points of clarification on instructions for the final assignment:
Regarding the name of the APA’s DRN group:
The final assignment refers to the “Disaster Response Network” but when you search for this on the APA site you will be directed to materials that interchange the names “Disaster Response Network” and “Disaster Resource Network.”
The “Disaster Response Network” and the “Disaster Resource Network” are the same thing. Evidently the group changed its name to the “Disaster Resource Network” in 2016 to better reflect the nature of its mission. So you can refer to any material that uses either title for the group.
Regarding the instructions to present your analysis as it would apply to a disaster scenario of your choice from the all-hazards homeland security mission space:
You may choose any type of scenario- you may base your analysis on a real past event, or you may develop your own scenario based on more generic information relevant to the homeland security mission. You may also use publicly available scenarios found through web-based research that are used to inform training and exercise development in homeland security.
References:
– https://www.apa.org/
– https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/hls/articles
– https://www.apa.org/practice/programs/dmhi
