Research Reflection

I will not be limiting myself to one LGBT population but all of them. I will be researching the correlation between sexual orientation and emotion. I assume that LGBT people may be more emotional than heterosexual people. I see this mostly with gay men that I have come in contact with in my life, most seem "feminine" when it comes to emotions and crying.  I wonder if this is related to the discrimination that they have faced or if it is something more related to a mental disorder. 

I think that hardest part of this research is going to be finding facts about emotions and LGBT. I know there are plenty of opinions out there but has there been actual scientific research done.

9: Subject Specific Database

My search string is "prison AND reentry AND society  AND  challenge". I chose to use Google Scholar as my database which gave me 14,200 results as compared to ASP that returned 5 results. Although both searches gave relevant results, I would say that obviously google gave more since there were thousands more options even though I was quite specific.

When comparing the 2 searches, google results can be narrowed by keywords, author, publication, date, types of collection, legal opinions/journals. ASP can be narrowed by search terms, full text, scholarly, references, publish date, publish type, language, cover story, image quick view, PDF full text, # of pages, doc type and, publication.

Of the number of results mentioned above, I would say 3 of the 5 from ASP are relevant and countless are relevant from google scholar. There were way too many results for me to go through them all and see how many were relevant but on the first page alone, 6 out of 10 were relevant. Google had the 6 readily available whereas ASP had 2 available in full text and 1 available with Find-It.

Since working with databases, my research question hasn't changed but has been somewhat answered, although not completely. My question hasn't changed because it is a specific question which is narrow enough to find results when searching for information.

The hardest part about composing my research question was focusing it on the right source. Instead of focusing on the prison system, I am now focused on the actual prisoners and their challenges when reentering society.

Popular Magazine vs Scholarly Journal Article

The articles that I have found are:
Scholarly:
Authors  Garland, B.; Wodahl, E.; Mayfield, J.
Title  Prisoners reentry in a small metropolitan community: obstacles and policy recommendations
Source  Criminal Justice Policy Review, 2011, 22, 1, 90

Popular:
Author  Lattimore, P.
Title  The challenges of reentry
Source  Corrections Today, 2007

These article are similar in that they are both written well. They are easy to read and stick to facts.
The are different in the fact that the scholarly article sites references and has no advertisements, which are present in the popular article. Another big difference is that the popular article is very low level and doesn't go into too much detail whereas the scholarly article is very specific.

Getting Ready to Use Academic Search Premier

Although I have never used this search before, I found it really easy to use. I found the best results when adding more than just 2 keywords, I used 4 to be exact. And, I also narrowed down my results by selecting PDF full text. I think this is a great search to use for research. I have used google scholar in the past which was helpful but this seems to be more of a thorough search.

I don't have any fears when it comes to using this database to do research.

Your Population

Since reading a bit about my population, I have found out a bit of information that I never would have expected. I found out that when prisoners are released into society, they are not trusting and fear the unknown. They have difficulty getting jobs because of their offenses, which makes me want to find out more about how they deal with these circumstances. Do they keep trying to find jobs even if employers won't hire them or do they give up?

I have really only found general information but do still need to look further into the book that I have found for my project.

Encyclopedia vs Wikipedia

After doing some searching, I have found that an encyclopedia is going to be more useful for my research project than a Wikipedia search. The pros to using an encyclopedia are that there is a lot information in one area and you can easily find out if the author is a credible source. There are however cons to them as well, they may be out of date or very restricted when searching for a topic. I was searching for prisoner release or anything of that nature and was only able to find 1 out of 4 books that actually had some information for me. Even though I couldn't find information for my project on Wikipedia, I still feel like there may be pros as well as cons to using the site. A pro is that it is easily accessible wherever you may be and most information seems to be pretty up-to-date. However, a huge con about Wikipedia is you never know if a source is very credible and/or trusted.

As I mentioned above, I found 4 encyclopedias about my topic but only 1 was relevant. I located these books by going to the library website and searching in the advanced search section for "prisoner AND encyclopedia", then went to the reference section of the actual library to locate the individual books.

I tried to search for an E-encyclopedia by going to the library website and in the advanced search I typed in "prisoner" and then below in the "collection" area I chose "reference-online" but there were no results.

So needless to say, I'll be sticking with the encyclopedia route for this research project since Wikipedia has nothing to offer and the encyclopedia actually had some interesting facts for me. Plus it was published by a credible company, even better!