Assignment 22: Original Research

Yes I have done original research before, in my psychology class last year, I had to interview 3 people for my final paper and I have also done it for little things in middle and high school but that was the biggest thing that I have used it for.
Original research is when you go out and find information on your own, you get your own research instead of getting it from library research such as research from a book or academic database, etc. Library research may guide original research because you may find a study and want to make your own study and compare it to that one or see if the results of that study in true in their town or with the people in their lives.
A pro of library research is that it is most likely legitimate because usually studies are preformed in big numbers and preformed by doctors in that field of study, that show its credibility. Also it is usually easier to get library research than to go out and get your own. A con of library research is that you may not be able to find research or a study on your specific topic that you are researching, so if you use original research, you can make your own topic of research. Also, another con of library research is you don't get to be involved in your topic, which may mean that you don't learn as much because with original research, for example if you do an interview, you get a lot of experience from it and can know the information first hand, so no bias except your own will affect the research and you may understand learn more from it.
Critical thinking skills that I think are used in both original research and library research include: interpretation, evaluation, inference, analysis and self-regulation. I think the most important critical thinking skill for library research is evaluation because when you are looking for research for a paper or presentation it has to be credible and evaluation is a skill you need to know if the information you are finding is just that, especially since it is not original research that is being done right in front of you, it is by people you probably don't know and you have to evaluate their articles, books, websites, etc. The most important critical thinking skill for original research I think is self-regulation because you are the one who is going out and finding the research, so you have to be able to monitor what you're doing, whether it is being in control of a study or an interview by evaluating and analyzing in one without having your judgments interfere.

Assignment 19-Statistics

My first statistical information about polygamy was found from an online scholarly journal from EBSCO. This article showed how its data was collected which was by taking a sample of 2330 Protestants, Catholics, Polygamous Mormons, and other religions who responded to a series of questions regarding their sexuality, polygamy, religious orientation, religious doubt, and whether Mormons are considered Christian. The data was collected by Michael E. Nielsen  out of the department of psychology at Georgia Southern University and Ryan T. Cragun out of the department of sociology at the University of Tampa. 

Nielsen, M. E., & Cragun, R. T. (2010). Religious orientation, religious affiliation, and boundary maintenance: The case of polygamy. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 13(7/8), 761-770. doi:10.1080/13674670902832805

The only government documents I could find did not have statistics on polygamy itself but I just found the laws against polygamy and the political votes on that were done for marriage laws to be passed, I will continue looking though!

Checking In

      The successes that I am having with my semester research presentation is that I have all my questions done except for two and I am starting to put my questions on slides on a power point of what the slides are going to say because they can obviously not have sentences of my answers to the research questions.
      Challenges I still have with my presentations is finding a couple sources, such as one government document and one encyclopedia entry. I also have to work on fixing up and finishing my annotated bibliography.

Although I do not have any other research projects in my classes right now, I am sure I will have a paper or research project next semester that I will bring researching tips from this class and you it in my upcoming classes. Right now I have just been using the google 101 tips for my own personal knowledge of things that I want to look up and research.

Intellectual Property

My definition of intellectual property is a work or invention that is from someone's creativity and which they created and have the rights for.

The expert definition that I found was according to WIPO.Com, "Itellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce." Also owners are granted exclusive rights.

     Examples that I found in everyday life are:

Books, research documents, original artist paintings, etc.

Business logos, business name, business slogan and even business colors

Inventions

Recipes, business methods, marketing strategies, etc.

   Intellectual Property changes when it is shared because it may not be shared using the author's credit which means that no one knows who wrote, drew, or thought of that idea. The person that was the creator made not get paid for his or her ideas or a website like the website we looked at in class may try to get money using someone's creation, when really they have nothing to do with donating money for a cause or giving money to that person.

Urvashi Vaid Presentation

1. My expectations before this event was that Urvashi Vaid was going to talk a lot about gay marriage and the struggles that is going on to try and change the laws. I also thought that she would be a really good speaker since she is a very famous figure in the LGBT rights movement.
2. I thought that she was more going to talk at us and just tell us how we should feel but she was very kind and open to whatever thoughts we had, she even told us that she knew she couldn't change our minds in her short presentation or at least that it wasn't likely. I liked how she did her presentation because she didn't just talk, she changed up the dialogue; she told us stories, gave us statistics and compared different populations and not just LGBT populations, she also talked about heterosexuals and people of different races.
3. A statistic that I learned was that 6 out of 50 states are now legalized in gay marriage, I knew there were a few but I wasn't exactly sure how many. I learned that there has been a big, positive shift of attitude towards the LGBT community but race has still not been raised or represented enough in the community.
4. Yes I believe that it made Urvashi Vaid an authority on the topic because she is an author of LGBT movements and an attorney whom has been a leader in the LGBT movements. Also, she seemed very knowledgeable of all her facts and statistics in her presentation by sourcing where she got her information from.
5. One thing that can assist me on my Alternative Viewpoints paper is at the beginning of her presentation, Vaid discussed a suicide case from being bullied because he was gay and that is my topic of my Alternative Viewpoints paper, so I could find an article on the Tyler Clementi bullying case.

Google 101

      I learned a lot about Google in our class last week, I did not know that there were many searching tips that worked on Google, I thought those type of things were just in Academic Search Premier and scholarly search engines. In the past when I have used Google, I just would type in my search string with no extra characters or search tips because I did not know it would help, I would just reword my search if it did not work or use quotations around certain words that I wanted to come up together in the search. In class I learned many different ways to search on Google, such as, using this symbol , ~ = related terms when you use it in your search string before a word, that using the plus symbol is similar to using the work AND in Academic Search Premier and using .gov country, it allows you to find a government website. I also learned that you can google information from certain countries instead of general Google, which I thought was very interesting! I learned about the tools of Google on the side of the web page, like related searches not yet visited sites, etc. I thought that being able to search with images was cool and seems very useful to me. Since learning all of these things about Google I think of it very differently for using it as a source for research because it will make my research a lot easier to find a specific subject and now that I learned about Google Scholar, the sources I find will not just be websites or articles from them, they can be databases and academic works, which I find very impacting for my research.

Assignment 12: Blogs As Sources

    My opinion on the debate of using Blogs as a source really depends, I think, on what topic you are trying to find a source for. If you are trying to find a very factual source than I would make sure that it has sources that back up the information in it and know the writer's credibility. I know that a lot of blogs are opinion bases, just people giving their thoughts but there are also educational blogs and who's to say the other blogs aren't educational. Also, maybe the topic someone is researching on wants someone's opinion than a blog like that would be a great source.
   The blog that I found and was looking for was an opinion based blog, I found one from a woman's perspective, she talks about her story of how she became a polygamist and how her life is: http://www.polygrrl.com/polygamy-wife-part-1.html.

 I thought this was very interesting because its a type of information that really expresses one side of what it is to be a polygamist in this present time. I definitely think that this blog is legitimate because who knows about polygamist relationships better than someone who is in one.



(2011). Retrieved from http://www.polygrrl.com/polygamy-wife-part-1.html

Assignment 13: Semester Research Questions

 When I re-read the research questions for our project, I found that I could answer questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 right now from the research that I have done.
I do not think that I need help, I haven't searched for question 8 yet about finding an organization that educates about my population but I do not think that will be too hard to find, I think that question 5 will be the most difficult of the questions to answer from the few questions I still have left and I will make sure that is the next thing I search for.

Research Reflection

     An LGBT population and issue that I would like to focus on is bullying of homosexual boys in high school because I feel that bullying is a very important issue in the world for all types of students but I feel that especially boys that are gay get bullied, since they are not "manly" like they are supposed to be. I think that bullying is a major issue in homosexual boys lives and I would like to learn more about it. Like I mentioned,  I assume that they especially get bullied because they don't fit the stereotype of being manly, I have learned this from seeing it in movies/television shows. I think the most difficult challenge when doing research will be finding statistics on bullying of homosexual boys in high school.

Specific Database

1. I chose Opposing Viewpoints for my specific database.
2. The specific database had more relative results for my topic because it had more articles on the issue of what polygamy rather than more just talking about what it is.
3. In Academic Search Premier, to narrow down results, you can used the advanced search. In the specific databases, narrowing down results is more specified and easier to find because you can see the databases a-z but there are quite a lot to look through, so you can also search databases by subject and then for more specific subjects, you can use the subject guides, which have a lot more subjects to look through than the general subject categories.
4. My first search string did work.
5. The specific database had 8 articles and the Academic Search Premier had 2 articles that seemed to be relevant to my topic from this certain search string.
6. For the Academic Search Premier articles, one was available in the full text and the other was available through find it. The articles from Opposing Viewpoints, were all available in full text.
7. I would say that since working with databases in this class, my search strings have changed because last week in class I learned more how to use the parenthesis and the asterisks to work to my advantage and in the past when I have searched for articles for research, I did not use them.
8. I would say the biggest challenge for me, so far in doing research has been to not give up on a certain search string that I would like to find articles on, I know that I just have to keep trying by changing a word or using the parenthesis and trying different databases to find it.

Popular Magazine Article/Scholarly Journal Article

   The first article I read was my scholarly journal article, called "Should Polygamy be Permitted in the United State?" I liked this article because even though it was scholarly, it was easy to read. It also was not long in length like I thought it would be but still had a lot of good information. It had an abstract and information about the author at the end.
    The popular magazine article that I found was from People magazine. It was fairly long but a little shorter than the scholarly journal and again, easy to understand. It did not have an abstract like the scholarly article and no list of sources or information about the author at the end of the article.
    Overall, I liked both of the article because they were both interesting and went very well with my topic.

Dodd, J. (2010). Four Wives AND A Firestorm. People, 74(15), 76-83.

Ross, S. (2011). Should Polygamy Be Permitted in the United States?. Human Rights, 38(2), 20-21.
    

Getting Ready to Use Academic Search Premier

 I like this database, I think that it is easy to use and has a lot of different databases that have a range of topics to find articles and academic journals, also there are so many databases to look through! I saw that they have a database for religious articles, so I will have to see if that will work to my advantage in finding an article on my topic. I used this database a lot in English 151 last year because we had to find a lot of online articles and academic journals for our papers. No I do not recall using any other databases for my classes and I don't really have any fear but I guess in the back of my mind the only fear I have using this database is not being able to find specific articles relating to my topic but in the past and so far I have had a lot of luck using these for my research papers.

My Population

          As I have read more about my population I have learned that a lot of polygamist families that live in the U.S. settle down in places where there are not laws against it, which I always wondered where that was possible because I thought they were getting married illegally. Besides it being illegal almost throughout the U.S. I am struggling with the conflict of whether I believe it is morally wrong or right. Before reading more about my population I definitely thought that it was wrong but as I've read in my book, it gives examples to make you think differently about polygamy, it compares how cheating on your spouse is morally wrong and illegal but it is becoming more in the norm, it happens a lot and wives/husbands forgive one another. I feel as if cheating is one of the most disrespectful things you could do to your spouse and a lot of people refer to polygamy as cheating but if the spouse knows about it and consents to it, is it still disrespectful and wrong to do to them? Those are the kind of questions I am grappling with, so I'd say that reading more is definitely making me question my initial thoughts. A big question that I have about my population is how do the women feel about their husband having other wives, since I am focusing on men having the multiple marriages because it is more popular in society. That will be the next information I want to find out on my population.

Encyclopedia vs Wikipedia

             I feel as if encyclopedias and Wikipedia both have pros and cons to them. For an encyclopedia, a pro is that there are a numerous amount of them and they are categorized into specific topics that make it easy to find the information you need. Also, another pro is that you know where to find the sources of the information that is in the encyclopedia, so that you can know that the information is valid. A con that I learned about encyclopedias in class is that they do not contain enough information, they may not give you the whole story of the topic you need or may skip information altogether, such as the encyclopedia that was supposed to contain all the countries in Central and South America but did not mention the country of Argentina, which I found pretty shocking. As for Wikipedia, I would say that the biggest pro is how easy and accessible it is to find the information you need because each page is categorized, which makes it easy to read, especially if you only need to read a specific part of the page, you can just click on the tap and the website will take you to that spot. Although, it is very easy to use,  a con is that, it is not a very valid source because anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, so it is recommended that you look at another source to make sure the information from Wikipedia is credible.
               I found two print encyclopedias when I searched for them. I first searched religion encyclopedias and I found one that was called Encyclopedia of World Religions but I am unable to view the table of contents online to see if it contains information about Polygamy in it. I also searched Polygamy encyclopedia and the catalog came up with one item called Encyclopedia of constitutional amendments, proposed amendments, and amending issues which I could view the table of contents and it did contain Polygamy. 
              I could not really find and E-encyclopedia on my topic, I searched the Britannica Encyclopedia database but the information I received was basically just the definition of polygamy.
              I believe that the second print encyclopedia and the Wikipedia page are both acceptable for my research project and contain some of the same information, both having history on the topic but the Wikipedia page specifically had information on polygamy in the Mormon religion but I would have to make sure the information can be credible.

OPAC Search Experience

1. The topic I have chosen for my research project is polygamy. I narrowed my topic to finding out why polygamists feel that it should be legalized in the U.S.
2. I am looking for both background information and information that is more narrowed on my topic.
3. I surprisingly was successful on my first try but I only believe that I was because my topic is not as popular and does not have many books at the library. I believe this because I only searched the word polygamy but came up with 50 results which is not an overwhelming search. I found the book I wanted the 3rd book down on the list.
4. When I searched for an Ebook it took a lot more tries to find one that would work for my topic than it did for a regular book. I found a book Alternative Relationship Life Styles and it was about polygamy in the U.S. which fit my topic. I would not mind reading an Ebook as long as it was a good book for my topic but I also would want a print book because I find it easier to read or at least then I can switch off from a print book and an Ebook.
5. I find it a little difficult to read a book from a computer screen, I think my attention just cannot focus as much on a computer screen as opposed to a print book.
6. I have an Ipod Touch that I could read an Ebook on but I definitely would rather read one on an Ipad or a regular computer because the screen is very small, which I need to zoom in on the text and means I have to scroll to see the whole width of the text.
7. I first just searched the word polygamy and came up with 72 titles but as I started scrolling down the page to look at my results, I saw that there were many DVDs that came up, which I did not like and I know that under the Miller Center Library the categories between books and videos are split up. I found that the Miller Center OPAC search had a lot more options and was easier to find a book on what I wanted.

What Do You Seem to Be True About Polygamists?

When I was asked to pick a certain vulnerable population that I should learn more about, I thought it is going to be very hard to just pick one population because I feel as if I could still at least learn something about every vulnerable population that I could think of. Also, my decision was more difficult since it was a population designated for the rest of this course, which made me keep doubting which population I should choose and I wanted to think out of the box for my population, one that isn't heard all that often, at least to me. After all, I chose a population that was very interesting to me and that had a lot of debate over it, polygamy. All that I "know" or think that I know about polygamists is that they believe it is completely alright to have more than one wife or husband but from what I heard is usually wives. I also have heard that usually it is the Mormon religion that demonstrates this and I have heard a lot of Mormon commercials on television saying that "they are just like us" and I really do not know anything about them but think it is interesting that they have a commercial to join their religion. Another thing that I have heard about polygamy is I have heard of the show Sister Wives, which is a reality show following a family that has multiple wives, which when I think of it I think it sounds morally wrong and very odd but I want to learn more about their point of view and why they think it is alright. The most difficult challenge I believe I will have while doing this research is to be able to have an open mind, I know my opinion that it is odd and wrong will want to interfere with polygamist's own opinions but I cannot let it get in the way of me learning.

What is Critical Thinking?

My definition of critical thinking is a way of thinking that is very in-depth with careful reasoning and analyzes every part of the situation, problem and/or question. It is a type of thinking that is looking beyond what you know and researching the possibilities. After researching a definition for critical thinking, I found that getting a definition from a dictionary was a very reliable source. Stated from the website Dictionary.com, disciplined thinking that is clear, rational, open-minded, and informed by evidence. (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/critical+thinking).  The source did not recommend a specific process that one must engage in to think critically. 

I definitely think that critical thinking and IM 204 Research Strategies have a big connection because throughout this course we will be using a lot of critical thinking, whether it is writing our papers or writing in our blogs. We will use critical thinking because we need to apply the qualities of critical thinking to our assignments, such as we need to be open-minded, which we needed in already in our first assignment about the vulnerable population and we will be using it the whole course. We will certainly have to include evidence for our papers and blogs because this class is about researching, which is finding sources to support our statements. Also researching about our topics uses critical reasoning because it opens our minds to other viewpoints and reasoning what we believe is right or a solution.