EVALUATION POINTS FOR AFTER A GUILTY VERDICT

As requested, here is a list of issues and evaluation points you can use for after a guilty verdict. It isn't comprehensive, so feel free to comment and add your own or just use a couple of these. It's completely up to you; use the most relevant evaluation points you can think of.

• Ethics: obviously,  the death penalty and imprisonment are unethical. But, restorative justice is also pretty traumatic. 
• Freewill and determinism: consequences of committing a crime tend to follow the ideology that criminals choose to commit crimes, despite upbringing, cognition, and biology all being deterministic explanations of crime. Thus, you can evaluate the appropriateness of punishing someone for what they didn't choose to do - if it's relevant. 
• Situational versus dispositional: this is one most relevant to imprisonment and treatments. Both seem to adopt the ideology that criminals themselves are to blame for their behaviour, whilst research has suggested situation and environment can play a role in determining criminality. Here you can refer to reductionism. Thus, are treatments likely to be effective if they're ignoring one aspect of why people commit crime?
• Methodology of research: a lot of research is content analysis, which is inexpensive and replicable, but is of course limited by the validity and methodology of the individual studies. You can, as with all research, evaluate population validity, ecological validity (most research is done in the field, which is great), usefulness, etc.
• Effectiveness of treatments: look at reduction in aggressive/anti-social behaviour, time/cost effectiveness, as well as recidivism.
• You can also look at how well research has been applied. Haney and Zimbardo suggested that individual differences should be taken into account, prisons should be used sparingly, and that psychological knowledge should be applied to prison policy. But the actual implementation of this seems slow, and prison is still more widely spread than most of the alternatives. There is still racial bias in US prisons, too. However, research raises the issues surrounding punishment and rehabilitation of offenders, and thus you could say any discussion is beneficial. 

Evaluation points for Stress

As requested, I've done some evaluation points for stress. They aren't the only ones, so if you think of any more, feel free to use those. 

Causes of Stress

• You could evaluate the extent to which each of these were nomothetic - does everybody have lack of control/work/daily hassles/life events? Does it cause each person stress?
• You could look at situational versus dispositional - all of these actually tend to favour situational explanations of stress, but the treatments tend to be dispositional, so this could be a good issue to look into. 
• You could maybe also look at how simple these causes would be to fix, and how the knowledge that they cause stress could be use. This leads you to evaluation issues such as usefulness and application. 

Measures of Stress

• Validity is a major issue here. You've got low construct validity in that it's hard to define stress and thus hard to know when you're measuring it, as well as face validity because the measures of stress can be affected by lying, memory, demand characteristics, illness, emotion, etc. Also, different people experience stress differently so using only one measure on participants may not be a valid approach.
• Reliability is also important. As different people experience stress differently, measures are unlikely to give consistent results if used again in similar situations. Too many things affect measures of stress and stress itself in order to give consistent results on physiological or self-report measures.
• Reductionism is a potential issue. Obviously, measures which are only self-report (e.g. SRRS) or only physiological (e.g. heart rate monitor) are reductionist and don't look at many features of stress response or the dynamic between them, whilst combined measures are holistic and thus may be more appropriate and useful.

Managing Stress

• Situational versus dispositional is also appropriate to evaluate here. Social support takes the situational approach whilst cognition is dispositional, as is behaviourism (biofeedback). Though, behaviourist ways of managing stress emphasise the role of positive reinforcement, so it has a situational element as well. You could obviously link this to reductionism and holism. 
• You could look at whether symptoms or causes of stress are targeted, and evaluate whether this is a good approach to managing stress. SIT attempts to prevent stress as well as help the individual overcome their current stress which Meichenbaum suggests is the actual cause of stress, thus it targets causes rather than symptoms. Biofeedback treats the symptoms of stress response rather than the causes as it teaches relaxation, though this may prevent stress too. Social support targets the symptoms and causes in that having strong social networks can provide support to prevent stress, and provide support once stress has onset. 
• You could also look at effectiveness by looking at whether research supports it, or by cost and time effectiveness. Biofeedback in the form of EMG machines are expensive and require a practitioner, it's somewhat difficult and expensive to get a therapist but once you've learned the skills it lasts a long time, and social support is free and lasts a long time, but is not instantaneous. 

Also, some of the studies are pretty unethical, such as Geer and Maisel, and those which put participants on waiting lists rather than giving them therapy. Though control groups help with internal validity checks, they aren't the most ethical. E.g. Meichenbaum's study had a control group of students who did worse on their exams than the experimental groups - if they were in the other group, they'd have benefited and thus they lost out. 

Effectiveness and Appropriateness

These two seem to catch a lot of people out, because they're pretty hard to define and apply to different areas. Here's some generic tips, with an example to help. 

Effectiveness - the extent to which something brings about an effect, usually a positive one.

(Example question: Assess the effectiveness of offender treatment programmes)

Introduction - define effectiveness

1. Who is it effective for?
(e.g. anger management is only effective for non-psychopathic males, who have an anger problem so it isn't effective for a wide audience, whilst cognitive skills programmes are effective for most offenders as they target the cognitions believed to result in criminality, such as taking a social perspective, self-control and morality)

2. To what extent does it make a difference?
(e.g. to what extent do the treatments reduce recidivism or improve behaviour? Anger management is believed to be somewhat effective, but not in all cases. Ireland et al found it did reduce some angry behaviours. Ear acupuncture appears to make a significant difference to aspects of an addicts life such as improving mood and sleep as well as cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Cognitive skills programmes found to reduce recidivism rates by 14% which is positive, but it's obviously not effective enough to reduce it by more)

3. Is it time and cost effective?
(e.g. therapy treatments tend not to be because they require several sessions, whilst biological treatments such as acupuncture are quick and easy to administer)

Conclusion: summary
Somewhat effective, but a holistic approach where two or more methods are combined would be most effective. 

Appropriateness

Appropriateness refers to the extent to which something is suitable, usually in terms of population or situation.

To what extent are treatments for your chosen disorder (e.g. depression) appropriate?

You could answer this by looking at the population: people with depression. Personally, I'd break it down into biological treatments and therapies. 

Biological treatment: drug therapy.
Yes it's appropriate because... it requires little participation from the client, who is likely to feel apathetic, lack motivation, etc. 
No it's not appropriate because... treating a disorder that does not necessarily have a biological cause with drugs may not be treating the real issue, but actually just reducing the symptoms of low serotonin levels.

Cognitive/behavioural therapies: CBT
Yes it's appropriate because... the relationship between the client and therapist may boost confidence in the client and in others and give them a sense of purpose. The behaviourist element to CBT also encourages and rewards self-motivation and non-depressed activities, which helps to teach the client to overcome possible future relapses.
No it's not appropriate because... it requires a LOT of motivation on behalf of the client, it's often quite a lengthy process which people suffering with depression are unlikely to have the energy to go through, etc.

And my conclusion would probably be that drug therapy is appropriate for those with short-term, reactive depression because they need a "quick fix", but if depression is long-term or recurring, therapy enables skills to deal with depression more effectively and thus this may be more appropriate in the long run.