LGBT

It took me a while to pick just one topic on LGBT that I wanted to learn about because first of all I have quite a couple of gay men and lesbian women in my family and friend circle. I feel as if I do know a bit on those topics and I have done a paper on the transgender population before so I would really like to learn more on the broad spectrum of bisexuals. I think its crazy that there are people out there who are sexually and physically attracted to both sexes. Not that it’s a bad thing in anyway whatsoever, I just have no prior knowledge on the matter. I have heard rumors of bisexual people being “sluts” and doing whatever they want and so on, however I do not believe this about them, because I don’t lump a group of people together based on there sexual orientation, nor do I know much about this population to make a judgement on them. I think the biggest challenge on finding information for my paper on bisexuals would be finding relevant and very informational results for it.

subject specific database

I chose to google as my specific database. My search string was “homeless AND poverty AND Minnesota”.  Most databases brought up relevant websites and information for my paper. Although, google brought up thousands of results it still did give me a few good results. Other databases such as the academic search premire website gave me quite a few results, but not as much. They seemed to be something that I would trust a little bit more than something off of google, maybe that’s because I’ve always been told not to use google for a scholarly database.

Getting to narrow down results was very easy for ASP, I just simply added some more describing words in my sentence. Google, on the other hand was harder to try and narrow down. Although, I did narrow it down a little bit by adding some more specific words, I still ended up with thousands of results to dig through.

ASP had about 5 or 6 relevant results for me, that I most likely will use in writing my paper. Google did have a few that were informational and relevant, but there were simply too many to sift through to find all that I wanted.  ASP had only one full text available for me and google obviously had all that I wanted to go through, ready for me to read in full text.

My research questions definitely have changed. Being able to narrow down questions and twirk them in ways to get better answers and results was a learning experience.

My biggest challenge in composing questions for my search string would be narrowing things down. It took me a few tries to get a good search string on my topic with good results. I think this is just going to take practice in figuring out better words and connecting words to use.

magazine article vs. scholarly journal

I found an article in glamour magazine called Poverty, Equality, Money and Little Pink Houses: What You Need to Know Today. The article, all though informative on views of our government’s opinions on the matter, it really didn’t have the information I was looking for. There wasn’t much information on what we can do about the poverty problem, how bad it is or even any information on how people have gotten there or how people suffer trying to get back up. The majority of the article was what Obama and such think, who to vote for, and where to focus our money; this article would not be something I would use for information for my paper. The scholarly journal article that I found was called Healthy Generations: the Impact of Childhood Poverty on Health and Development. This article is very informative and helpful for me! This is most definitely something I am going to use for my paper; it has everything I asked for and more. This article gave the exact definition of poverty, race differences in poverty, facts on families, children’s health, and populations in poverty from year to year.  Not only does this article have more of the information I was asking for, but it has all of the sources where the information came from and an author’s name, book references and so on; I’m very happy I found this article.

carpentier, M. (2008). Poverty, equality, money and little pink houses: What you teed to tnow today.

Oberg, C. (2003). The impact of childhood poverty on health and development. Retrieved from http://www.epi.umn.edu/mch/resources/hg/hg_childpoverty.pdf

acedemic search premier

                Academic search premier seemed to be a very good database! My topic on welfare in MN doesn’t seem to pull up a lot of books or information, so I know it couldn’t really pull up too much information on my subject either.

                I have never used academic search premier in another class before so I have no other experience with it, I do believe it will be very useful for me though.

                I have used a different database for a research class I took, unfortunately I do not remember the name of it, I took the class my freshman year in college, but it was very useful for me. It was my professor’s database that he had used since college and it would pull up such specific things on what you were looking for, there was really no need to search a lot of other places because it would pull up such useful information.

                The only fear I would have on using this would be that it would be too broad in some cases. Maybe not pulling up what I’m looking for because my topic seems to not have a lot of information out there in the first place.

my population

               After getting more information and reading a little more about people on welfare in MN, it has definitely already started opening my eyes to some new points of views. I have to admit that I was sometimes a little biased on homeless people or people on welfare.  I assumed that many people on welfare abused that fact that they were getting “free” money. Although I have read on m any cases that people are doing this, many people in fact are not taking advantage of this in a bad manner. Many people get down to using welfare not because they want to, but because of a big event that took place and makes them turn to welfare. The bad thing about the United States government involving welfare is that we make it a hole that you can rarely pull yourself out of. Once you stare being on welfare, a lot of times there is a very slim chance of getting out and that’s something people don’t do enough research on and see.

                I have many questions on this population ranging from personal stories on being on welfare and getting out of using welfare, to the depression that comes with it.

                I have found out much information on my population, a lot I did name above. Welfare is not being abused as much here as many people think. We are now turning to immigrants and trying to point fingers in their direction because we now are helping immigrants with welfare, and many don’t see this as the right thing to do. I still have much to learn, but am starting to learn much already.

encyclopedia vs. wikipedia

                Some pros for using the encyclopedia would be that it’s a very easy thing to get a hold of. Encyclopedias have a lot of very useful information that can help go into depth on really any subject.  A con for using an encyclopedia is that it doesn’t really go into depth as far as needed for say college students. For high school students it could most likely give you a good chunk of what you need to know on the subject, but sadly I just don’t believe it’s enough for college students, at least those who would like to get a decent grade.  Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia used by everyone I know! Some pros for Wikipedia is that it’s very handy, if you’re near a computer you can use Wikipedia and it is filled with some very useful and fast information. Although it seems like a very nice thing to have, I believe, as well as many others, that this may not be the case. Wikipedia’s information can be changed by absolutely everyone! For most searches, you can’t really prove that Wikipedia is giving you all of the right information.  Even the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is saying that it may not be suitable for academic research. Though many things on Wikipedia can be right or at least point you in the right direction to finding a good source for that information, I would not use it as my base source.

                I found one print book when typing in poverty in MN. The book is called fighting poverty, I am unable to see the contents of the book though, so I am not quite sure if it would be a useful source or not.

                I didn’t find any e-encyclopedias on my topic. I tried many different titles and ways to possibly get encyclopedias on my topic but I had no luck. Maybe that’s something I’ll have to continue trying to do, maybe I’m going about it the wrong way or just have not had enough experience with this to be as successful yet.

                I most definitely think that an encyclopedia is more beneficial for my research project.  Although I can’t deny using Wikipedia for many things, I will most likely just use it to point me in a good direction while researching. The encyclopedia is just more reliable than Wikipedia, it makes me feel more comfortable using it.

OPAC experience

1)      I chose the homeless people for my research project for this class. I narrowed it down to homeless people in mn.

2)      I’m going to be looking for information and specific stories on what got some of these people in these predicaments and more broad information as well.

3)      I was very successful finding not only a bunch of books on my topic, but some very good ones as well. There were definitely less than I believed there to be,  but were definitely enough search views to get me the information I need.

4)      I tried looking up an ebook, and used my step-moms I pad. I did get a lot of options for homeless people in mn but some seemed to be very broad. I liked the fact that I could read the book from her ipad, but I can’t say that I know how long I could sit and read off of it. I think I would like to actually have the book in my hand, to highlight and read from the book.

5)      Like I said above, I don’t know that I could read an ebook for a very long time. I would prefer the actual book before an ebook, my mind would begin to wonder on a computer or ipad.

6)      If I were to read the ebook I would definitely have to use my moms ipad or nook so that it was not such a tiny screen, like something as small as my iphone. I believe I would get side tracked and start doing other things if I had such technology in front of me though.

7)      When I searched books right away so many options came up, some not even that related to my topic. Like I had been reading in other peoples blogs as well, movies and such were popping up with my book search too, where are OPACS obviously is split up. I like the miller center and will stick to mostly that place for research for this class and later research for other classes as well.