Helpful Exercise!

The next step in my research paper’s journey was this data gathering exercise.  We had a library presentation, which was very informative.  A UCF librarian demonstrated how to effectively find journals, articles and information on your topic.  I used the UCF database search and Google scholar.  I was very successful in my search and feel since my topic is so popular in society today I will not have much trouble finding previous research done on the topic.  I highly recommend using Google scholar for any research you need.  There are certain ways you can broaden your search by using the words “and” or “not”.  Once you find the right key words you should have no problem finding the necessary information. 

Here is my paper: 

Data Gathering Exercise

Kimberly King

ENC 1102

Professor Vives

September 13^th 2012

            I am researching on the effects Facebook has on college students.  To start my research on the topic I went to the website, http://library.ucf.edu/ and began searching in the database.  I searched with the key word combination of social medias, education, Facebook and college students.  I was surprisingly very successful with my first search with 134 results.  I clicked through the first couple articles and journals and thankfully most of them fit my topic perfectly.  After finding the necessary peer-reviewed articles I needed to find a primary piece of data.  I went to ProQuest and searched, effects of social media on education, and had no luck.  I then decided to just go to google.com because that is the search engine I am most familiar and comfortable with.  I searched “effects of Facebook on college students” and many blogs and newspaper articles came up.  I found a very interesting one with lots of data called, The Effects of Facebook on the Academics of Georgia College Students.  

I realized that not having many key words does not work very well in finding articles that match your topic.  The more key words you have the more specific your search becomes.   I was surprised to learn how easy it was to search the UCF library for articles.  Their database search is very helpful in finding exactly what you need.  At first when I started to use the suggested search engines I had a hard time finding good sources.  Once I used Google, which I what I am comfortable with, I had no problem finding exactly what I needed.  The Computers & Education journal had the most helpful articles relating to my topic. 

My peer-reviewed article called, The relationship between frequency of Facebook use, participation in Facebook activities, and student engagement, gave me some research done by others on the effects that Facebook has on school work.  They concluded that there are both positive and negative effects related to Facebook.  My primary document called, The Effects of Facebook on the Academics of Georgia College Students, explains the results of a survey given to students in Georgia.  This document has very informative graphs and data collected by the researchers.  This data can be used to back up my own ideas and findings into the conversation of my topic.  The documents hypothesis, “with an increased use of Facebook; there would be lower GPAs and people who study more would have higher GPAs. Along with this hypothesis, we believed that a student’s major would have not only an impact on Facebook usage, but their overall GPA”, was proven true.  This helps with my topic because it is answering almost exactly what I want to research about.  This is only one of the opinions I want to add in my research.  I would also love to find a document of someone disagreeing with this hypothesis.

I have decided that my research question needs a small revision.  My question was: What effects does using social communication through technology have on students of the University of Central Florida? Now I want to revise my question to:  What effects does Facebook have on student’s academics at the University of Central Florida? 

Overall this data gathering exercise was successful.  I have a good start as to what documents I will be analyzing and researching on to help answer my question. 

Works Cited:

"Trending Stories." Mashable. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2012. <http://mashable.com/2011/04/27/facebook-effect-students/>.

"StatCrunch - Data Analysis on the Web." StatCrunch - Data Analysis on the Web. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2012. <http://www.statcrunch.com/5.0/viewreport.php?reportid=23987>.