Personal Viewpoints Paper

Olivia Minor  

IM 204

Alternative Viewpoints Paper

           

            The homeless population that I would like to learn more about is especially families that have been kicked out of their homes and left jobless. I want to know how they survive with nothing left and no place to live. I am curious to where these families get money besides health care, food stamps and things like that. Where do they get the money from for everything else they need to live, especially with a family where there are multiple people to provide for.

            I am not all that familiar with homeless people or a family. I have seen the occasional people standing on the street trying to get money for you that look like they do live on the streets. I want to learn why most families become homeless do they loss their job, blow their money on things they can no longer afford and have gone in to debt. Because the homeless people on the streets are the ones that our money is going to. Our tax dollars and the money taken out of our checks to go to Medicare, Medicaid and healthcare if we are giving to them can’t we know why we have to give to them. I have never really read an article or anything on how most people become homeless besides losing their jobs but I want to know if there are other reasons than just one for the millions of people and families that are homeless.

            Most of the information I have gathered about homeless people are from seeing them in public, articles in newspapers about them, magazines and news shows. Each source gives different information on whether homeless families, students etc. Also, since I’ve done my research I have gained more knowledge about this population and I am looking forward to learning more and answering questions I still have about the homeless.

Research Reflection

So far with my research project I am lost with where we are supposed to be and everything so far. At the beginning I chose my vulnerable population to be homeless people which I would like to learn more about and how they survive on the streets but finding books and scholarly articles about it has been a struggle.

Blog Debate

I think that blogs are creditable source to use for information and research. If you look into a blog and see if there has been a lot of work put into it then it may be legit to use. Most blogs aren't filled with facts and information they are more about the authors personal viewpoints or opinion on whatever the blog is about. So I think that blogs are legit sources to use you just have to make sure you review the information on there knowing that some may not be true and that there will be personal opinion involved.

http://blog.endhomelessness.org/

This web address is from a blog about homeless people and their personal stories they have shared. It is from cities all over the US.

"About Homelessness." About Homelessness. Web. 13 Mar. 2012. <http://blog.endhomelessness.org/>.

Search String

The specific database I chose was JSTOR by going to the St.Cloud Library website and browsed through the Databases A-Z and just chose one that looked good.
I found that Academic Research Premier brought more relevant results for my topic.
You can narrow your search in Academic Search Premier by being able to chose document types, language, scholarly journals, full-text date range ad cover story. Though in JSTOR you can chose date range, language, publication title and article type.
My search string worked the first time.
I Academic Search Premier I found 324 results with most of them being relevant to my research and with JSTOR I found 2,456 results and they seemed to be relevant also to the ones I looked into.
All my articles were available in full text because I clicked that box to narrow how many results I got in Academic Search Premier.
My search string question has changed many times because, some of the keywords you use will get you a lot of results and sometimes not many. Changing it multiple times I think I now have a good search string to work with and it has gotten better every time.
The hardest thing for me is figuring out what to use for my search string and trying to figure out what i actually want to know about my population. I am still figuring it out as I go and am getting closer to what I need.

Getting Ready to Use Academic Search Premier

I have never used the Academic Search Premier before but I thought that it was fairly easy to use and operate. It looked a lot like the OPAC search engine the only difference is the we are looking to find articles and magazines instead of books. My overall impressions of this database were pretty good, it is easy to use and not overwhelming at all. I have never used Academic Search Premier in another class yet. In other classes I don't necessarily use a specific database I mostly type whatever I need to find out in google and go on from there. The main fear I have about using this database is that I may not be able to find what I am looking for on here right away.

Your Population

Since I have started my research about homeless people and reading about this vulnerable population in books, online articles and from others resources. My assumptions about this population have changed. I have been mostly looking into why are most people homeless people homeless and do they try to change that. From what I thought was that most people are homeless because of the poor economy and cannot locate a job. While this is true for some people there are other reason like; wasting money away on alcohol and drugs.

I don't have any questions about my population right now.

The information I have gathered so far is just basic information that most people know or assume about homeless people. I have to still go into depth with my resources. I am still trying to locate an encyclopedia and another book so once I do I am hoping to find new information that I can use.

Encyclopedia vs. Wikipedia

When it comes to using encyclopedias the pros of using them is that the topic you are researching thats all you will be reading about. They provide you with a lot of valuable information that is useful and reliable. Also, they are filled with so much information that can be dated many many years back. Though there are cons to using encyclopedias especially the fact that they are so long, and that so much new information is always being found the information in them gets out dated very fast. Wikipedia's pros are that its on the internet you can access it very easily and almost anywhere, it also it updated constantly so the information is up-to-date. The big fall back of using Wikipedia is that anyone can access its information and change it which makes it hard to know if it's reliable.

While searching for an encyclopedia article on my topic I was unable to find any results. I went to the Miller Center Library homepage and used the advanced search option. From there I typed my topic homeless people in the first box and encyclopedia in the second box. And there were 0 results found. I just may not have been doing it right but I couldn't locate any print encyclopedias or E-encyclopedias. 

Since I was unable to locate any encyclopedias I wasn't able to read any information about my topic.