Writer's Journal #15

As I continue to work on my research project my CRQ has mostly stayed the same. I want to ask the question, “how can we implement a strong recycling system within our accounting firm right now?” This question answers the question of when as well as what are we going to be doing. It is a very specific and not too broad question that I can definitely find results through proper research whether it’s primary or secondary as well as getting my own data through perhaps surveys in other ways.

Given my most current iteration of my CRQ question, the types of secondary sources I think would be the most useful for my larger research project would probably be websites and magazines. I think people can relate a lot more to finding things on websites and information through magazines and newsletters and things that they can easily access versus data that they would have to really dig into. Magazines and websites kind of already do the work for you so all you have to do is read through it and decide if it’s more accurate information or if it’s biased or not as accurate as perhaps a different website. The other thing about magazines and websites is that generally they’re written so anybody can read them. This is very helpful to the majority amount of people because not everyone is a literature scholar and therefore they need more simplified articles and magazines and just written publications in general. Simplification can make it so anybody can understand what you’re saying and they can go to the sources and then it leaves room for them to figure out whether what you’re saying is true or perhaps there’s a little bit of bias to it.

Well given that I have a laptop I can probably access any website out there. So in this sense I have websites easily accessible to me. I also get People magazine as well as other fitness magazines and I can also use those if I need to. If they have something that relates to what my research project is it would be helpful to use them. Unfortunately I get mostly people related magazines and more drama related so I doubt any of them will be about sustainability. I think secondary sources are a lot easier to find than primary sources.

I think there’s a lot of great companies that have amazing websites that are related to sustainability projects and this would be a great way for me to do a little digging with my secondary sources. All of them do their own projects and research but they don’t necessarily have primary publications out there in scientific journals and so this is where I can use these secondary sources but not have the bias or the lies about the source. It would be real information but we just don’t know exactly how accurate it is because no scientific study was done on these websites. They could later on become scientific websites but right now they’re probably a work in progress in there for these would be great sources for me to use.