Research progress

I have been narrowing down my research topic and am now finding more things related to what I want to address in my project. I am in the process of writing my first draft of my literature review and trying to figure out what to write. I am sort of lost in how to format my literature review, but am doing my best in trying to figure it out. I am still gathering information that I find useful.

Research Project

Here is an update on my research project. I was having a hard time narrowing down my research and even coming up with my research question. I emailed the organization that I am working with and asked them to help me narrow down this topic by using a few questions that I emailed them. Eagerly waiting to hear back from them so I can keep researching more articles that are more related to my project.

Foster Care article

a) This article was written by John G. Orme and Cheryl Buehler.
"Foster Family Characteristics and Behavioral and Emotional Problems of Foster Children: A Narrative Review."
Family Relations, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 3-15

b) This article talks about all of the different factors that could lead to emotional or behavioral problems in children placed in foster care. They define and explain the following factors that influence the foster children as: parenting, the family home environment, family functioning, martial functioning, family demography, child temperment, parents' mental health, and social support. I thought that the information that they presented did an excellent job of explaining how these factors affect the children after they are adopted or placed back with their biological family.

c) I think that the article was well-organized. I like how it started with some background information regarding foster care and the statistics of how many children were in foster care in 1982, 1996, and then in 1998. It just shows how this is an increasing problem. They then presented the table which I felt was very informational. After that they went on to describe and explain each of the contributing factors. I liked how it should how each factors affected the general population and then how it affected foster families.

d) I think the purpose of the literature review was to compare the differences between the general population and foster care children.

e) I thought that this article was very well-written. I do not believe that there were any violations of critical thinking presented in this article. It presented facts and were from reliable sources.

Google Tricks

The one google trick that I think is very helpful and that I will definately use it alot down the road is putting the quotations around the keyword that you are trying to search for. By doing this it searchs for the exact keyword and narrows down your search tremendously.