Back to the Bases (get it? it’s like basics)
It’s Week 6 and it’s time to dive into the Big Bertha of research assignments! To do this, I used the information learned from the lovely librarian Gail who instructed my Critical Thinking and Writing class as well as my Asian Americans and Popular Culture class, which I took last quarter. Finding the OmniFile link, I immediately typed in “(diversit*) AND (college OR university) AND (race* OR ethnicit*)” in to the given search bars. Happening almost instantaneously, I received roughly 3,000 results from just a few words. It was like magic.
What Did You Find, Celine?
Thanks for asking, subtitle. I found an academic journal called, “Precollege Exposure to Racial/Ethnic Difference and First-Year College Students’ Racial Attitudes” written by Nicholas A. Bowman and Stewart Dafina-Lazarus discussing how the racial backgrounds of students and their past exposure to different racial groups translate into the next stage of their lives: college. Specifically, the authors sought to recognize how impactful interracial and racially homogeneous friendships and experiences that occur in high school are in forming attitudes towards diversity in college and beyond. Interesting, the article also failed to have a bias towards any particular racial group, drawing assumptions and suggestions based on its survey of 4,000 students from 28 various universities.
But, What Were You Looking For? Well…
After experiencing how difficult online database searches can be last quarter, I went into this initial search with optimism and without a goal in mind, simply browsing around. I was lucky enough to have a more controversial and interesting topic this time (compared to boba). Even though I was not looking for anything particular, this first source actually connects well to the research I’ve conducted in the past via the SCU archives and online surveys. For example, it relates to how I distributed my survey to first-years exclusively. I did not intend to limit my responses in this way, but it ended up being an advantage since they could draw upon their recent high school experiences to answer the questions.
The tutorial we read did not particularly address any issues I encountered, yet I have knowledge about the type of problems that online databases cause given my past experiences. Fortunately for us, we had to amazing Gail to guide us with how to find the best sources in the most effective way, allowing me to find this gem of an article.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. Hope you love the magical references 😉