9/17 Blog Post

In our research on bullying, I would not necessarily include newspaper articles unless it included cited information or centralized information (such as a community paper featuring the death of a student most likely as a result of bullying). Countrywide newspaper articles are more trustworthy in accuracy but are often bias to certain political views. Government documents would be an excellent source when citing any sort of bullying prevention laws. Government documents are trustworthy and unlikely to be afflicted with bias. A scholarly journal or book would be perfect for our research though. Having a magnitude of information about one topic in one place would be spectacular, but finding it would be difficult. I am sure we can find scholarly articles on GALILEO or something but I am one of the few people who prefer hardcopy books. 

 Here is what we talked about in class:

Scholarly journals are written for scholars. They are written by other scholars that can be useful for scholars like us. They do not always contain pictures but graphs can be used to help explicate the author’s point.

Newspapers are written for the people of the community. They are written by “qualified” writers that can best suit the community’s needs. There are also advertisements by the local community that can influence how the paper runs. The newspaper can often be biased because of their sponsors and political views. They feature current news events and are generally short in length.

Scholarly books are written for anyone interested in the topic that has general background knowledge about the topic. It often contains terms that only people who know about the topic would know. Scholarly books are written by experts in the topic rather than many different people like a scholarly journal.

Government documents are written for anyone who is politically minded or someone who is doing legal research. These documents are certified by the government officials, not really given credit to a single author… though secretaries do count, they act on the behalf of the government, not themselves. There are often many charts and the length varies tremendously.

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