Hello All,
In past weeks I have had difficulties forming a question. After Rahad’s comment about a topic being too “boring” I really felt obligated to shift the way in which I was approaching my potential topic. I finally chose bullying. I needed something that I would be passionate about, something that perhaps I can relate to, maybe even something that I have experienced firsthand. While this helped me discover my topic, I must admit that the initial research is not easy because of the immediate bias embedded in me about bullying. Being bullied as a child makes me immediately empathetic towards the anti-bully side. However I am constantly pushing back because I want to explore beyond my understanding and scope of the kinds of effects that bullying has on individuals, basically I want to explore the complexity of bullying. This means I want to consider both the negative, as well as possible positive outcomes produced from bullying. I feel that it is important to keep my bias in check or I will risk losing any insightful data that may help me balance my thoughts and ultimately reach a final conclusion on the topic.
One of the other issues that I am facing is data overload. While bullying has only been a popular topic of concern in recent years, its outcomes such as increasing incidents of suicide, lured in several scholars to study the phenomenon. This resulted in large amounts of data being produced, from a variety of scholars exploring a variety of aspects on bullying. So basically, Bullying is multi-dimensional; there is physical, mental and cyber bullying. Then there are the motivations behind bullying, the effects on the victims, and the policy side of it. These are all great and I am sure that they will benefit me in my research, but now it’s a matter of trying to sand things down and attempt to figure out what data best suits what I am focusing on.
One of the things I noticed while doing initial research is that sometimes I will come across articles that completely confuse me. They are talking about bullying on a few pages and suddenly it becomes a mix of things that aren’t even related. These articles not only puzzle and frustrate me, but also waste a lot of my time. I need to possess better skills on how to weed out irrelevant articles in order to better manage my time.
