Sample COPES Essay Questions

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COPES Question:
If a twenty-two-year old woman with generalized anxiety disorder, who experiences sleep disturbances due to excessive worry, receives cognitive behavioral therapy or psychodynamic psychotherapy, which will produce a greater reduction in her sleep disturbances?

Search Process: I initiated my search process with the Universities online library. My COPES question deals mainly with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and possible therapeutic treatments; because of this I began my search using Scout advanced search. I decided to begin my search here so I could look at articles from a vast range of databases before narrowing my search. My initial search utilized the key words “generalized anxiety disorder” and “cognitive behavioral therapy”. …show more content…

I returned to Scout and utilized the key words “psychodynamic psychotherapy”, “generalized anxiety disorder” and “adults”. This search provided fifty-five thousand hits. I then narrowed my search down to scholarly peer reviewed journals that were full text and published within the last seventeen years. This reduced my possible hits down to two thousand. One of the articles I found was a “Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy in generalized anxiety disorder: A randomized, controlled trial.” Based on the abstract from this article I felt like its content would be valuable when comparing cognitive behavioral theory and psychodynamic psychotherapy. While reviewing that article I found a reference that spoke about diagnosis of and treatment recommendations for an individual with an anxiety disorder. This article had valuable information about both cognitive behavioral therapy and psychodynamic psychotherapy. After finding multiple articles through Scout, I began to look at other databases for information pertaining to psychodynamic psychotherapy. The first database I looked at was Science Direct, after finding useful articles when researching cognitive behavioral therapy, I was hopeful I would have similar luck with psychodynamic psychotherapy. Unfortunately, this was not the case. Majority of the articles I located in this database were not valuable to my COPES