Original Research

I took a psychology class in high school were we conducted original research. We researched how car dealerships treat men and women differently. We did this by having a girl and guy from our group go to 3 different dealerships and ask them a series of questions about the same vehicle. We also did a group project where we researched what seniors and juniors future plans were. We did this by conducting a survey. With original research a person can creates questions, finds answers, and analyzes the data themselves. With library research you do create questions and find answers but you cannot go out and find them. You just have to rely on others research to answer the questions for you. Library research can guide original research because it can give background information and raise further questions while also helping answer these questions. Some pros of original research are that you can learn and experience for yourself. Some cons can be that it is difficult to get exact answers and it is less structured. Some pros of library research are that it can be done at any time and the information is easily accessed. Some cons of it are that sometimes research has not been done on the specific question you are researching. The critical thinking skills I think are involved are relevance, breadth, logic, and significance. I think breadth is the most important because it can extend a person's research by raising further questions which can also result in better analysis and results.

Statistical Information

The first source I found was from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or HUD. The source I found was titled, The Anual Homeless Assesment Report to Congress. It is is the form of a book but it goes over topics of how many people are homeless and the use of homeless shelters and thier capacity. It also gives numerous statistics on these topics. It does give information on how the data was obtained.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, & Office of Community Planning and Development. (2007). The Anual Homeless Assesment Report to Congress.

The second source I found was from the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation. The source was titled, Homeless Service Use in Minnesota. It gives statistics on how many people in Minnesota are homeless and how people are using Minnesota homeless shelters. The report states all the different sources it recieved its information throughout it.

Hansen, M., & Warren, E. (2007). Homeless service us in Minnesota: Emergency shelter, transitional  housing, and permanent supportive housing, federal fiscal year 2010. St. Paul, MN: Wilder Research.

Checking In

I think the biggest challenge of the semester research project is organizing the information. We have been spending all semester researching our population, and that results in a lot of information. So my biggest challenge is organizing my thoughts. I have a lot of information and I am just struggling to put it in a logical order so my presentation will flow very nicely. In everday research I just find it difficult to find the exact information I want. When I come up with an idea I have a specific thing in mind that I want so I struggle with finding that. After I search for awhile though I end up not being so specific and find something that works just as well.

Urvashi Vaid

Before attending this event I really didn't have any expectations. I didn't look into it much or know what was going to be talked about. I just figured she may talk about an LGBT issue. I thought the presenter did a wonderful job of giving information. She incorporated personal stories along with facts to get her point across. I also felt this helped the audience understand and kept them very engaged. One thing I didn't like was how when she talked about people's opposition to gay marriage I felt she used extreme examples. Even though people use that i feel like the majority are more rational. Obviously, she was biased on the topic so it is understandable why she used this technique. I thought the point she made about because the movement has won same sex marriage doesn't mean it is over. Just because the LGBT community has received this right does not mean society views them equally. Even now the African- American population still struggles with this. I felt that Urvashi Vaid had authority on this topic for multiple reasons. She has written three books on LGBT topics, she is a lawyer, and has been apart of the LGBT movement for many many years. I don't know if I can specifically use this presentation in my alternative viewpoints paper but I did learn a lot of things and it did help me understand the topic a lot better.

Intellectual Property

My definition of intellectual property is the ownership of a person's own ideas. After searching the term on Google I came across a good expert definition on The United States Patent and Trademark Office's website. They defined intellectual property as imagination made real. It is ownership of dream, idea, an improvement, an emotion that we can touch, see, hear, or feel. It is an asset just like your home, your car, or your bank account. There are multiple examples of this in academic and everyday life. In everyday life a person may come up with a funny joke then a few days later their friend uses the same joke. A person may find themselves claiming the joke is theirs after their friend uses it. In academic life a person may create a hypothesis about something, they then can create an experiment to test it. This whole process is their academic property because they came up with the idea and tested it. When intellectual property is shared or manipulated I think that it becomes less personal. The person who originally came up with the idea can feel less ownership of it, especially when they are not given credit.

Google 101

I learned a lot of new things during Google 101. I will list all of the things I learned during the demonstration.
1. ~
2. related:
3. + or -
4. Using ends of websites like .gov or edu
5. The Google Art Project
6. Searching by a picture instead of words
7. Google translator

Learning all this changed my opinion because before I thought there wasn't a lot of ways to refine a search on Google. Now I know there are multiple ways to do this. It will help a lot when I using it for other projects because I do have some trouble with narrowing down results or finding what I want. I think I will use these tools for school work more than everyday life. In everyday life I usually just use Google to look up a quick stat, fact, or picture. When I am doing school work I can use the - or ~ to narrow results or expand them. I also can use .gov or .edu to help find specific things. Overall, I think Google 101 helped a lot and I look forward to using the new tricks.

Semester Research Assignment Questions

After reviewing the semester research assignment questions I found that I can answer most of the questions. Question 4, which asks, what are some of the challenges this group faces in mainstream society? I think I have bits of information here and there for this question but I could look more into it so I can learn some specific challenges. I also think I could work on question 6 a little bit. The question is, Whare are the challenges that people have in doing library research and original research on this human population? I don't think this question has to much research that needs to be done to answer it. I just need to take some time and evaluate it. Overall, for most of the questions I just need to sit down and organized my information and see where I am missing things.

Blog Evaluation

Before taking this class I didn't have much experience with blogs. I was first introduced to in when going to a presentation about obesiety oppression and the blogosphere. When I went to this I realized that there were a lot of people who are using blogs. That is all the experience I have had though.

I think blogs can be useful. They can be good when researching different opinions. Some blogs can be good for research and some can't be, it just depends.

For my topic I used a blog titled "The Homeless Guy". The author has posts from many years ago. The main purpose of the blog was to raise awareness for homelessness and get people to suppport  it. There was a lot of interesting posts just on general information and how you can help a homeless person.

The one I found most interesting was titled Why do people become homeless. The link is below.
http://thehomelessguy.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-do-people-become-homeless.html
The author talks about different ways people become homeless and he stresses the difference beteween "why" and "how". This post was good for general information and helping people understand and syphathize with a homeless person. I thought it was more of his own definition of why. Based on what I have learned I thought some facts were left out about how they become homeless. They could lose their house from natural disaster or war and he fails to mention that. Overall, I thought the post was informative but it lacked some information.

The Homeless Guy. (2012 March 12). [web log comment]. Retrieved from http://thehomelessguy.blogspot.com/

Research Reflection- LGBT Population

An LGBT population I think I should learn more about is the gay population. In society there is a stereotype that all gay men are really feminine. They are into fashion, they talk with a higher voice, and anything else that is not socially acceptable for men to do. I know that this is not true about all gay men but it is difficult to ignore the stereotype when that is how many people identify gay men. I find the topic difficult to understand overall. Last semester I took a class in communications and we worked on a group project with the topic of legalization of gay marriage. I am  strongly opposed to this because I was raised in a Christian home and have never really changed my thoughts, they have really became stronger as I have gotten older. Two members of my group were gay. I was weary at first, but it really turned out to be a great experience. I did not change my opinion but the whole thing really taught me a lot of things. So, I do not believe that being gay is a choice. I know this is a very harsh opinion but it is what I have grown up believing. Even though my group project taught me a lot of things I still stand by my opinion. I think the most difficult thing I will encounter while researching is to not let my opinion get in the way. I feel very strongly about this topic but the point of my research is to learn and inform others about the topic, not try to persuade them to think how I think. I will just have to be open to learning new things.

Using a Subject Specific Database

This is the search string I decided to start with when searching different databases for articles on my topic:

minnesota AND (homeless* OR refuge* OR abandon*) AND (adult* OR mature) AND (support OR help OR provide)

The subject specific database I decided to use was the Cambridge Social Science Database.

When I used my initial search string I did not find very relevant results in either database. For ASP I adjusted my search string to create more results. It only gave me four results and none of them were relevant to my topic. After playing around with my search string, I finally got more results when I used the following one: homeless AND minnesota AND (support OR provide OR help). With this search string I found eight results that were relevant to my topic and three had the full text option and the other five had the find it option. While searching the Cambridge Social Science Database I found many results. A lot of them were irrelevant to my topic. I changed my search string to minnesota AND homeless* AND adult* AND (help OR support OR provide). I still had a huge number of results but I was able to find a four articles that were relevant to my topic. Of these four none of them were in full text but they all provided the find it option.

Since working with these databases I do not think my research question has changed at all. It has taken some time to find information that I want but after change my search string a bit I do find articles that have some very valuable information. I think the hardest thing has been taking the time to modify my search string to find things I am looking for. I cannot use the same search string for each database. It takes some time to figure out the right keywords and synonyms to use. After I figure that out though I do find some really good information.

Scholarly Journal and Popular Magazine

The first article I found is from a scholarly journal called the American Journal of Health Promotion. The second one is from a popular magazine titled, Modern Healthcare.

Both of these articles gave a lot of useful information on my topic. They had some similarities and differences in their structure and content.

I will first discuss their similarities. They both were written formally. You could tell each author knew what they were talking about and had a lot of experience with the subject, but at the same time it was not difficult to understand. Each article talked about health concerns for homeless people. Another similarity in their content is that they both started out with a list of statistics to introduce their topic so the reader can better understand the information. They both had a title and listed the author as well.

Even thought there were some similarities between the articles, I think they had a lot more differences. I will first discuss their differences in structure. The scholarly journal was about 10 pages while the popular magazine article was a little more than one page. The scholarly journal had an abstract and containe headings. The popular magazine article had neither of these things. The scholary journal had a list of references at the end, while the magazine did not. As for the differences in the content I did not see as much. The journal article was written to show the results of a study conducted and was very in depth while the magazine article was just giving facts on a certain topic and did not go into great detail about it. I could see that the magazine article was maybe written to catch a person's attention while the journal article was soley written to inform people of results.

I think overall both of these articles are very useful to my research. They are both very different, but valuable information can be taken from both of them.

Shelter environment and placement in community affects lifestyle factors among homeless families in minnesota. (2006). American Journal of Health Promotion, 21(1), 36-44.

Harlin, T. (2011). Making lemonade: Revamping care of homeless when funding is cut. Modern Healthcare, 41(8), 24-24.

Getting Ready to Use Academic Search Premier

Academic Search Premier can be a very useful tool. I think it will be very helpful when doing research for our projects. I really liked how there is a lot of different options to narrow down your search. After playing around with it a little bit I can see how it would be useful to find specific things that I could be looking for. The database also seemed very large. There is a lot of information that can be found in it.

I am some what familiar with this search database. I used it in high school while taking College Reading and Writing. We had to do a research project similar to this one. It was a few years ago though so I don't remember much about it. Back then I used Academic Search Premier to find scholarly journals. I don't think I have used any other database for research that I can recall.

When thinking about how to use this database for research I do have some concerns. It can be very difficult to sift throught articles to find specific information I may want. Hopefully I can learn how to narrow down my searches to target more specific information. Also, a lot of scholarly journal articles can be very long which can make it difficult to find certain information I may be looking for. To resolve this issue I will just make sure I skim the article before reading it and I will try to determine if it contains what I am looking for.

My population

After doing some more research on homeless adults in Minnesota I think my assupmtions have changed. I didn't realize all the different reason a person could become homeless. Before I assumed it was becasue a person had no job and was to lazy to try and find one. After reading, I found that that is not the only case. A person's house could have burned down, natural disaster and war could force them away, along with many other things that have nothing to do with being lazy.

After doing this research I still have some questions and a lot more research to do. I want to find out a little more about why people have these types of attitudes towards the homeless. I also want to find out more about other parts of Minnesota, not just the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. I also want to know why homelessness is much more prevelant in big cities versus rural areas.

So far I have found a lot of basic information about my population. I have found what homelessness is, what the causes are, what the concerns are, different attitudes towards the homeless, and what people are doing about it. I also found some more specific information about homelessness in Minnesota. I found some demographics on the Twin Cities area, some history on homelessness in this area, and what Hennepin County has done to help the situation.

Encyclopedia vs Wikipedia

Encyclopedias and Wikipedia can both be useful sources for information. They  both have some pros and cons.
Pros of encyclopedia: information is more reliable and it gives a broad understanding of a topic
Cons of encyclopedias: earlier encyclopedias are very biased, no credit given to those who assisted with project, information can become outdated very quickly
Pros of Wikipedia: quick and easy to access, free, lots of different kinds of information, information is easily changeable
Cons of Wikipedia: because anyone can change it information can be unreliable, writers of information are anonymous

When I was searching for an encyclopedia on my topic I found one titled, "Encyclopedia of Homelessness". I found this by using the advanced search on the library website. My search string was homeless AND encyclopedia. I also found an encyclopedia on domestic violence and another on health and aging. I did not find these articles useful but I could possibly use them later. I did not find any E-encyclopedias on my topic.

I then went on to find a Wikipedia entry on my topic. I searched homeless AND Minnesota with no results. I then searched homeless AND adults and had no results as well. I ended up settling on an article titled, "Homelessness in the United States".

After reading both of these articles I went on to compare the two. They both were very interesting and each had their own unique benefits. The Wikipedia entry provides its readers with a basic definition along with demographics, historical background from the pre-1960s to the 2010s, causes, public attitudes, assistance programs, a list of crimes by and against the homeless, situations in major cities, possible sources of income, health concerns, and a section concerning women. It also had a long bibliography that seemed to have some credible sources.

The encyclopedia I found was two volumes. It contained a lot of the same information as the Wikipedia entry but it expanded on this information and was much more in depth. It had everthing you could think of and more. What I liked about this encyclopedia is that it had infomation about the Minneapolis St. Paul area, which is more specific to my topic. The encyclopedia also had the author of the articles listed along with a list of suggested readings following each article. I liked the list of further reading because it gave me specific places to find more information about my topic. I think the encyclopedia is more appropriate because it gives more information and lists the authors of the article.

Locating Books on My Topic

After narrowing down my topic I chose to research homeless adults in Minnesota. To start, I am going to study general background information. As I develop a greater understanding for the topic I will search for more specific information.

This is the search string that I used when looking for my book:
1. I went to the library homepage and chose to do an advanced search
2. I chose English for my language, then for format I chose book and electronic book
3. I searched homeless & Minnesota & adults and no  results were found
4. I then went on to search homeless & Minnesota. I initially found only books from the late 80s, I then sorted by date but all the books were very in depth information
5. Lastly I just searched homeless, sorted by date and found a wide variety of options


The following are the steps I took to find the book I decided to get:
1. I wrote down the call number
2. Wrote down the location
3. Went to the Miller Center to find the book


I was very successful and found the book on my first try without any help. I did not find any electronic books available on my topic. I would be interested in using one though because I have a smartphone and an iPad.


When searching system the Great River Regional Library I had some difficulty. I just did a basic search and typed in "homeless". A lot of the books that were found were not very related to my search. I like using the Miller Center website much better.

What Do You Assume to Be True About________?

The homeless, a population of people I really do not think about to often. Only when I've seen someone walking down the street asking for money or carrying a large load of items around is when this population may cross my mind. I am from a town called Isanti, we have a small population of a little over 5,000 people. So I really haven't had to experience this unless I was in the cities. Although I know little about this population, I do have some strong opinions toward it. I do not feel bad or pity homeless people at all. I believe that everyone has been an equal opportunity to receive an education and compete for some sort of job. When I see a homeless person all I think is that they should be out trying to get a job and not waste their time begging for money. If a person were to have a physical or mental disability that would prevent them from learning at the same pace as others and limits them to only certain types of jobs then that is a different situation. But I am talking about people who are able and just have had a tough time in life. I think that they just need to put a little work and effort into it, and after awhile they can succeed in some way. Some people may completely disagree with this, that is why I want to research it. There is so many different opinions about this subject and I have never really looked into it. My opinions all came from my own deductions and from my dad. We were in California once and a homeless person asked him for money, he didn't give them any so I asked why. He explained to me that he had a tough time in school and his family had little money, but he just worked really hard to find a job. He believed that they should do the same.

Although I am very interested in learning about this topic, I am also a little wary. I am afraid that my strong, harsh opinions may hold me back in my research. I feel that I a may not be able to open up to new ideas and this may cause me to be less interested in the topic overall. I will make sure I focus on overcoming this.

Overall, I think this project has a lot of potential. It seems very interesting and I feel I can learn a lot about the homeless population.

What is Critical Thinking?

What is critical thinking? That is a very interesting question. To be honest, if someone would have asked me this question anytime before Tuesday at 3:30pm I would have give some generic answer or possibly even guessed. It just so happens that I am taking a critical reasoning class this semester and we discussed critical thinking in our first class meeting. I would define critical thinking as the ability to reason logically and apply that reasoning to real life situations. After doing a little investigating I found that "experts" on dictionary.com define it as follows; the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion. This definition does not specifically identify a particular process that a person must engage in to think this way. However, I do believe that through this defintion we can see that critical thinking does take much more effort and deeper thought than everyday life events.

Now, how does critical thinking relate to a class titled 'Research Strategies'? I believe that these 2 things are related becasue to do research, and to do it well, a person must engage themselves in critical thinking. Research is not something a person can just breeze by and barely think about it, they have to think much deeper.  Doing good research is challenging, but once you finish I feel it is very rewarding to see the great work you created. This course will be challenging and fun and I am looking forward to learning how to become a better researcher.

Hello Everyone!

Hi! I'm Shana!

I am a sophomore at SCSU and I am studying nursing. This is my first year here at St. Cloud, I transferred from St. Thomas. I am really enjoying it! I am recently married and I love my new husband very much!

This blog is for my IM 204 Research Strategies class. I feel confident about writing, I don't hate it. There is always room for improvement though. I am excited to learn more about research but am not looking forward to all the work.

I look forward to blogging more! Bye for now!