Update

My literature review is coming along but its coming along slowly. I'm looking for more sources to use in the review right now and once I have all of them I will continue working on the body of the paper. Things are starting to get more crazy now that we are coming down to the end of the semester. Not only in this class but it my other classes also and all things will start converging soon. STRESS!

Update

I have got a great start on my Literature review. Slowly but surely I am finding more and more sources to use. The sources that I have found so far have been pretty good, but I feel like it's going to be hard to find more quality ones. I also spoke with a member of the fraternity to update him on the progress of the project. He asked me a few questions which I was able to answer. That is my update for now.

Update

Recently in my research to find a solution to the lack of diversity in the fraternity I have looked at previous research done. I wrote my literature review on the sources that I have used so far. Some of the sources are a big help but it was a struggle to find good ones. Im still searching for me and things are still slow.

My article

Stolle, Dietlind, Stuart Soroka, Richard Johnston. "When does Diversity Erode Trust? Neighborhood Diversity, Interpersonal Trust and the Mediating Effect of Social Interaction."

Political Studies. Vol. 56 Issue 1 March 2008. 

The study of this article is based upon a survey done between the United States and Canada. I compares the citizenship involved democracy of the United States to the Equality, Security and 

community survey of Canada. This is the first study done the is cross country to find out a comparable result. Both confirmed the negative effect of neighborhood diversity among white majorities. The most important finding is that not all people are equally sensitive to the context. The purpose of the literature review for this article is to point out the flaws in the study. The study being done is a qualitative study. The surveyors when out and tried to find information based on the survey with no numbers involved. The way the data is collected could be a pretty sound method but the only problem is that people might not write the honest truth in the survey. One guideline of critical thinking that they are not paying attention to is to pay attention to bias. The people doing the study might have wanted some certain result and changed the results based upon what they wanted. Also people taking the survey could have had one thing on there mind at the time and this could skew the results. 

Foster Care Article

Orme John, Cheryl Buehler. "Foster Family Characteristics and Behavior and Emotional 

Problems of Foster Children: A Narrative Review." Family Relations. Vol. 50 No. 1. (2001)

Page 3-15.

The article is about the effects of foster care on children after they are adopted into a new family or return to the original family. It looks are all the different effects that could factor into the problems that arise from it. It also states the problems that do occur from foster care. The article is organized by first giving facts about foster care and telling what it is exactly also. It goes on to give real examples of foster care situations. It shows a graph of the results of a study done on foster care also. The graph shows who the study was done by, what the sample size is, and then what was looked at in the study. The article goes on to describe all the factors that could be looked at in the study, how they effect the child, and how each factor should be done. The purpose of the literature review in this article is to show how foster care effects children that are in it. It also can be used to show way of dealing with foster care so that all children turn how to be the best they can. I don't this this article violated a lot of critical thinking skills. If there is any critical thinking skills that are violated it would be avoiding emotional reasoning. Foster care is a touchy subject and a lot people have opinions on the topic. All of the opinions are based upon emotional situations rather than facts. In this article it does a fairly good job of using facts based upon the studies that were done. Overall this was a pretty good article in the way it was set up and for the use of critical thinking. 

Google Tricks

The google trick that I tried to use was to use quotations around the words in order to use them as one. When I typed in my topic the first time I got so many results I didn't know where to start and the the information I got was hard to find good information in it. Then I retyped the topic using quotations and the results were cut back significantly. The data that I got was still not exactly what I was looking for but it was much better organized. I could work with this alot better. 

Research Challenge

A research challenge that I have had in the recent past was when I was researching a paper for my English class. The paper was on stem cell research. I started off great because there is a fair amount of information out there. The problem is that everyone publishes the same information and I ran out of info. I was unsure of how to find more and better information to lengthen my paper.