HUM DEV 336/Fall 2007

Preparing Your Poster Presentation

A well-constructed poster is self-explanatory and addresses the questions a reader is likely to have about your project. Successful posters achieve both coverage of the topic and clarity of presentation. In order to effectively communicate the nature of your work, your poster should be succinct, clearly presented, well written, and checked for spelling and grammatical errors.

Coverage and Clarity

Posters must be easy to read. In preparing text for your poster, aim for clarity of communication. Your goal is to educate your readers about what you have learned through studying an interesting topic. The APA guidelines for posters include the following points about coverage and clarity:

Have you provided all the obvious information? Will a casual observer walk away understanding your major findings after a quick perusal of your material? Will a more careful reader learn enough to ask informed questions? Ask yourself, “What would I need to know if I were viewing this material for the first time?” Then state the information clearly.

To achieve clarity, check whether the sequencing of the material and visual aids follows your idea and the steps you took to reach your conclusions. The APA guidelines offer useful advice:

Indicate the ordering of your material with numbers, letters or arrows, when necessary. Is the content being communicated clearly? Keep it simple. Place your major points in the poster and save the non-essential but interesting sidelights for informal discussion. Be selective. Your final conclusions or summary should leave observers focused on a concise statement of your most important findings.

Formatting a Poster

Conference posters have a standard layout that is composed of four columns that read from top to bottom and left to right. This arrangement allows several people to read the poster at the same time without bumping into one another.

Posters are visual. Think about color and design. Use graphs and tables to display ideas and results. Add drawings, photos, or other visuals to arouse interest and sharpen clarity. Posters should not be dry and boring, but neither should they be flamboyant. Avoid gaudy colors and patterned backgrounds. You can use color effectively by restricting yourself to harmonious three-color schemes while avoiding the kind of excess that will give your poster the look of an elementary school project. The APA guidelines advise:

Choose two to three colors and keep them consistent throughout the poster. Use strong primary colors (for example, red, blue, and yellow). They provide the best contrast and create the most professional impression. Keep lots of empty (white) space on your poster to enhance the effect of colored sections.

Use a large type font. Many experienced poster presenters recommend a sans serif font for the text (for example, Arial or Helvetica). You may want to use 20-point type for text and 48-point type for the title. Posters should be prepared in upper and lower case; do not use all capital letters. For your method and results sections, you can use “bullets” to summarize your procedures and findings.

Preparing Graphics

You can use graphs, illustrations, photographs, videos, tape recordings, computer displays, and other supplementary materials to enhance your work and make it clearer to your readers. A professional poster presentation is not decorated just to make it “pretty.” Each visual element relates to the study. Hand drawings and handwriting are sloppy and amateurish. The computer program PowerPoint may give you ideas for planning and preparing your graphics. If you do include these, make sure that you also discuss what the graph depicts in the text of your paper.

Placing Information on Your Poster

Mount the pages of your poster on construction paper or matte board that is large enough to provide a 1” to 2” border. You can also use large sheets of poster board. Do not overlap the pages or have pages hanging over the edge of the mounting material. All the information should be contained within the borders of the construction paper or poster board. This includes the reference section. Another method is to put the entire poster on a single page and then print it out in enlarged form.

You may want to attach your poster to a free-standing tripod. (A tri-folding cardboard device for presentations is available at office supply stores.) If you decide to present your poster this way, make sure that the board is light and portable. In placing the information on your poster, be sure to check the following:

1. Type font and size are consistent both in the headings and in the text.

2. Material has been placed in the correct sequence.

3. Only information that is absolutely necessary appears.

What Does A Finished Poster Look Like?

Elements of a Poster

A poster presentation includes a set of standard components that resemble the sections of a research article, as described in the APA’s Publication Manual (5^th edition).

Layout

Here we’ll look at an example that includes the major areas of a poster presentation. The design of a poster presentation usually includes four columns. The abstract, introduction, and research questions are usually in the first column, followed by a column devoted to research methods, then one to the results, and the last to your conclusions, references and, if appropriate, acknowledgements. Begin with your banner. Then, in the first column, place your abstract, followed by the rest of your information in four columns that read from top to bottom and left to right, ending with your references in the lower right hand corner of the last column. Number each of your pages

Each of these elements is discussed in more detail below.

Title

Authors and Affiliation

Banner

The title of a presentation and its author(s)--sometimes called a banner--are placed at the top of a poster (it can actually be an additional piece of cardboard across the top). Center your banner across the top.

Ways People Die:
Environmental Influences on Children’s Views of Death

Puddley P. Purrpott, Ph.D., and A. Jamal Garcia, M.A., University of Thanatology

Abstract

The abstract is a brief summary of your work. It is the first thing that people read about your work. It is concise (not to exceed 120 words) but it must include all the elements of your entire poster. It is the first item in the left-hand column of your poster. The abstract includes your research questions or hypotheses, method(s) used to collect data, brief description of your participants, synopsis of the main results and the conclusions drawn from the results. Write the abstract after all of the other pieces of your research are complete. Like the title, the abstract should be self-explanatory and self-contained.

Abstract

When questioned about the “ways people die,” children living in violent environments tend to answer quite differently from those who are comparatively sheltered from such experiences. The depiction of death was analyzed in drawings and responses of children (ages 7 -9) in matched samples from inner cities in Los Angeles, Detroit, Santa Cruz, and Bonn, Germany. Comparisons were made between population statistics regarding causes of death and those cited by the children. In violent environments, violent death was drawn by a majority of the sample. Where the death rate from violent events was low, children were much more likely to draw natural deaths or deaths from accidents. The results indicate that environmental factors play a significantly affect children’s death concepts.

Introduction

You’ll want to provide an introduction to your topic. In this section of your poster, give a brief description of the topic you are investigating, incorporating the past literature that supports your study, and a description of your goal(s) in conducting the study. Consider including the answers to these three basic questions:

1. What previous research led to your study?

2. What does your research add to the knowledge base?

3.Why is your study important or interesting?

4.What is the purpose of this study?

5.What do you expect to find?

Introduction

Research on the development of death concepts in childhood suggest that children progress in a stage-like progression in their acquisition of mature ideas of death (Nagy, 1948; DeSpelder & Stricklund, 2005). These stages are thought to parallel stages of cognitive development, and are similarly acquired in children no matter where they live.

However, it has also been found that children achieve a mature concept of death earlier if they have had significant death-related experiences, such as the loss of a parent (Silverman, 2000).

When questioned about the “ways people die,” children living in violent or death saturated environments tend to answer quite differently from those whose lives are comparatively sheltered from such experiences. “Few issues challenge our moral, intellectual, and political resources as does the topic of children and community violence — war, violent crime and other forms of armed conflict.” (Garabino, 1993). Besides possessing a more mature conceptual orientation toward death, children who experience firsthand the reality of death because of war or pervasive violence or in connection with other forms of catastrophic death often exhibit a fatalistic attitude toward death that contrasts with children whose experiences of death occur in more benign circumstances (Schonfeld and Smilansky, 1989).

The present study attempts to answer the following questions by asking children whose environments differ in degree of violence to create drawings depicting what causes people to die. We were interested in the following research questions:

1. Will children in violence-saturated environments report more violent ways of dying?

2. How does a child’s perception of the ways people die correlate to official statistics on the cause of death in that child’s environment?

3. What other environmental factors contribute to a child’s understanding of the ways people die?

Method

In the methods section, you describe the source(s) of your data and how you went about collecting it. Choose the most important information about who, what, when, and where the study was conducted. This is where you give readers a picture of how you did your study

Method

Participants

Four groups of children averaging 25 in each group, ages 7-9, selected from communities in South Central Los Angeles; Detroit, Michigan; Santa Cruz, California; and Bonn, Germany. There were equal numbers of males and females in each group. Participants from Santa Cruz and Bonn came from two-parent familes and were middle-class. The children from Detroit and Los Angeles were from inner city urban environments, two-parent households, and the lower middle class. The children were volunteers from their elementary school classrooms.

Procedure

Parents of each potential participant was approached by the interviewer and given information about the study. Written permission was obtained for each child before he or she was asked to draw or write their responses to the question: ‘What are the ways people die?’ The children were instructed to draw or write about anything they thought in response to the question. Children were furnished with drawing and writing materials. The children were told that a discussion about what they have done would follow. All procedures followed the ethical guidelines for conducting research with children and specified by the American Psychological Association.

Results

In the results section, describe what you discovered in conducting your research. Here you provide a summary of the most interesting findings. Begin with a brief discussion of how you analyzed your data. Then provide an overall description of your findings before presenting the specific findings. The results section can be enhanced with tables and figures if appropriate. You may want to include photographs or other illustrations here as well. Use material that helps to demonstrate your results. In this example, some of the children’s pictures could be added for visual interest.

Results

1. Main themes of the drawings and writings were analyzed by the method of content analysis. The content was then compared to community data (see Table below) to determine the degree of violence in the childrens’ environments.

2. Children living in violent environments depicted causes of death relating to murder, especially detailing “drive by” shootings in the South Central, Los Angeles population complete with accurate gang colors and dead bystanders, including babies.

2. Children living in high-crime neighborhoods were more likely to accurately portray the leading causes of death, especially handgun-related shootings.

3. Children with religious backgrounds living in a benign environment attributed the cause of death to “God’s will.” (In more than half of the drawings from the Santa Cruz, California sample.)

Discussion

In the discussion, remember to include both general and specific conclusions. You can include information about what you discovered as well as about results that did not show up in your study. Remember to highlight the most important aspects of your research.

Discussion

The data indicates that:

¨ Children living in violence-saturated environments depicted more violent ways of dying, including murder and suicide than deaths from natural causes or accidents.

¨ In environments where children were exposed to violent death either directly or via adults or the media, the rate of violent death reported by the children correlates to increased death rates from these causes.

¨ Religious beliefs influenced the children’s depiction of the ways people die in the population attending Catholic school.

¨ Dangers to child safety as emphasized by adults in the environment showed up in the children’s drawings in less violent environments depicting the physical environment (falling from the cliffs into the ocean and drowning and burning to death in a house fire) and adult warnings concerning loss of life.

When children in a lower-middle class, urban school in Germany were asked about the ways people die, the influence of environment was apparent: Violent deaths were described as being caused by “weapons” and “sharp knives.” Conspicuously absent was any use of the word gun. Hand guns are illegal in Germany and carried only by the police.

The population living near the Pacific Ocean depicted an unusually high number of deaths due to falling off the local cliffs into the ocean and drowning. This cause of death was very low in the statistics collected, leading researchers to wonder if children in safer environments related more to parental warnings about the dangers of death than actual deaths.

Discussion

It is possible that the content of the drawings might have been influenced by having the children in groups, with some children possibly copying a neighbor’s idea. One of the most interesting findings about this study was the difficulty in getting adults to allow children to participate. A contact in Greece reported that, even with her status as a university professor in child development, none of the schools in her area would allow the children to participate. Comments like “Why would we want them to think about death?” and “That’s something that would not be good for our children,” revealed that discussing death was taboo in some social environments.

As expected, this research not only suggests that individual differences play an important role in the development of death concepts (DeSpelder & Stricklund, 2005), but that children’s drawings can provide a window in examining the impact and consequences of environmental exposure to chronic acts of violence. This method had been previously used in the pioneering work of Nagy (1948). Nagy’s (1948) early work on children’s concepts of death promoted the notion that death awareness develops in a specific sequence of stages. The present study, in accord with the findings of Schonfeld and Smilansky (1989), indicates that the type of environment in which a child lives also must be considered.

References

In the reference section, include those sources that were most important to your study. Reference lists on posters are often presented in a smaller type font than the rest of the poster text.

References

DeSpelder, L.A. & Strickland, A.L. (2005). The last dance: Encountering death and dying (7^th ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Garbarino, J. (1993). Challenges we face in understanding children and war: A personal essay. Child Abuse & Neglect, 17(6), 787-793; reprinted in L.A. DeSpelder & A.L. Strickland (Eds.), (1995), The path ahead: Readings in death and dying (169-174). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Nagy, M.H. (1948). The child’s theories concerning death. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 73, 3-27.

Schonfeld, D.J., & Smilansky, S. (1989). A cross-cultural comparison of Israeli and American children’s death concepts. Death Studies, 13, 593-604.

Silverman, P.R. (2000). Never too young to know. Death in children’s lives. New York: Oxford University Press.

U.S. Census Bureau. (2001). Murder Victims by age, sex and race. In Statistical abstract of the United States (186). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.