The LGBT population I think I should learn more about is the transgender population. I have very little knowledge on these people and would like to learn more about them because the things I've heard I don't believe are accurate. I assume that transgender people are confused about their sexuality and they are actually just gay. I've also have been told that transgender woman are not 'real' woman and transgender men are not 'real' men. I'm not quite sure where I got these ideas about transgender people from. If I had to guess, I would say it had to have been in middle school and high school from my peers, when I first learned there was a thing as a transgender person.I don't believe I will have many, if any, challenges in doing research on transgendered people. The only challenge I could see is being able to get accurate information, but I'm not sure if this will be a problem at all.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
MasterFILE Premier
For this search I used the search string, (people* or teen* or adolescen*) and (cause* or motivate*) and ("steroid drugs"). The database I chose to conduct a search on was MasterFILE Premier. This database provided more relevant and less numerous results than Academic Research Premier did. Both of these websites come from EBSCOhost so the way to narrow down the results in both is the same. You can limit your results to full text, scholarly journal, publication type, publication dates, etc. Academic Research gave me a total of 18 results, and none of them seemed to be related to my topic. MasterFILE Premier gave me 6 results, but only 2 of them were related to me topic. Of the two that were related to my topic, one of them was available in full text. My research questions have changed somewhat since working with databases. I've narrowed down my topic a bit in order to find more accurate search results. My biggest challenge in forming a search question is creating a search string to go along with my research question and getting accurate results for that search string. In order to overcome this I think I just need to keep trying to formulate different strings to find the results I'm looking for.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Magazine Article vs Scholarly Journal Article
Magazine:
Kane, E. (2008, April). Ananbolic steroids-uses and abuses. The news Magazine of Veterinary Medicine, 4.
Scholarly Journal:
Petersson, A. (2010). Substance abusers' motives for using anabolic androgenic steroids. Drug &Alcohol Dependence, 111(1/2), 170-172.
The magazine article and scholarly journal article I found on steroid abuse were a lot different. The scholarly journal gave a lot a factual, informative information on the 'whats' of steroid abuse (what it is). The magazine article gave more background on motives and the 'whys' of steroid abuse (why people do it). I thought the scholarly journal was harder to read because the print was in two column side by side, rather than just have full text across the entire page, like the magazine article did.
Kane, E. (2008, April). Ananbolic steroids-uses and abuses. The news Magazine of Veterinary Medicine, 4.
Scholarly Journal:
Petersson, A. (2010). Substance abusers' motives for using anabolic androgenic steroids. Drug &Alcohol Dependence, 111(1/2), 170-172.
The magazine article and scholarly journal article I found on steroid abuse were a lot different. The scholarly journal gave a lot a factual, informative information on the 'whats' of steroid abuse (what it is). The magazine article gave more background on motives and the 'whys' of steroid abuse (why people do it). I thought the scholarly journal was harder to read because the print was in two column side by side, rather than just have full text across the entire page, like the magazine article did.
Getting Ready to Use Academic Search Premier
Overall, I liked using Academic Search Premier. The features make it easy to locate your topic and narrow your results to something that you actually would like to use rather than unrealated materials. I've never used Academic Search Premier for another class, so it's all new to me. I know I have used other types of databases in high school, but that was so long ago I don't really remember the names of them or how I used them. The only fear I have about using Academic Search Premier is that I will get confused with all the features and how each of them changes what kind of results I recieve.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
My Population: Steroid Abusers
After doing some reading and research on my population, my assumptions have change a little bit. For one, I didn't know that sometimes steroids are prescribed to people for lung conditions and other things. I originally thought people just took them to gain muscle. I now really would like to know what causes someone to become an addict. I also want to know if steroid addicts use steroids just to gain muscle mass or if someone who is prescribed them can become addicted from taking them for other health related reasons. So far I've found that steroid abuse is most common in people over 18 and it usually affects men more than woman. Though, steroid abuse is growing rapidly among young women.
Encyclopedia vs Wikipedia
In my opinion, Wikipedia has more cons than pros. For one thing, the authors are anonymous. You have no way of knowing if the information you're receiving is coming from a creditable source or not, therefore you don't know if it is true or not. False information is another big con of Wikipedia. If you're trying to research something, you most likely want accurate information, and with Wikipedia, you don't know for certain if you're getting that. One pro I see of Wikipedia is that if you are a professional on the topic, and you know for certain something is false, you can change it. Another pro is the easy accesiblitly because it has different pages for each category.
As far as encyclopedias, a pro would be that there are a large amount of them and often they are categorized into different topics. Another pro is that they have sources for the information and you can easily find who published the book to know if the information is accurate or not. A con of encyclopedias is sometimes they don't contain complete information. Important information can be left out.
When looking for encyclopedias on my topic, steroid abusers, I went to the library catalog and did an advanced search. I typed steroid abuse and encyclopedias. Unfortunately, this search had absolutely zero results. :( But the I saw something farther down on the page that said: Search other libraries in the Consortium for steroid abuse and encyclopedias? I don't really know what this means, but I clicked it anyways and found two pages of encyclopedias. Though, not all of them related to my topic. I did find about 4 that did.
When looking for an E-encyclopedia on steroid abuse, I used the EBSCOhost page from the library website. I again type in steroid abuse and encyclopedias in the search box but there was only one result on a book that was titled Health Issues, so that didn't help me much.
Since I wasn't able to locate and encyclopedia on steroid abuse in the Miller Center, I can't really answer if an encyclopedia or Wikipedia would be better for my research project. Though, after looking at the pros and cons of both, I think I would prefer to use an encyclopedia because I can just trust it more.
As far as encyclopedias, a pro would be that there are a large amount of them and often they are categorized into different topics. Another pro is that they have sources for the information and you can easily find who published the book to know if the information is accurate or not. A con of encyclopedias is sometimes they don't contain complete information. Important information can be left out.
When looking for encyclopedias on my topic, steroid abusers, I went to the library catalog and did an advanced search. I typed steroid abuse and encyclopedias. Unfortunately, this search had absolutely zero results. :( But the I saw something farther down on the page that said: Search other libraries in the Consortium for steroid abuse and encyclopedias? I don't really know what this means, but I clicked it anyways and found two pages of encyclopedias. Though, not all of them related to my topic. I did find about 4 that did.
When looking for an E-encyclopedia on steroid abuse, I used the EBSCOhost page from the library website. I again type in steroid abuse and encyclopedias in the search box but there was only one result on a book that was titled Health Issues, so that didn't help me much.
Since I wasn't able to locate and encyclopedia on steroid abuse in the Miller Center, I can't really answer if an encyclopedia or Wikipedia would be better for my research project. Though, after looking at the pros and cons of both, I think I would prefer to use an encyclopedia because I can just trust it more.
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