There’s always this problem where we teens never have a voice in society when it comes to issues that go on in our community. This PAR project has been my big chance to put out all my ideas out there, and give my input on what’s going on in the world today with teenagers my age. I’ve had a chance to discuss why I think there’s so much violence between teenagers, and discussed ways to make changes. This project has given every senior at Boston Community Leadership Academy an opportunity to go beyond the limit, and go into depth with the different issues we each have.
The question to produce that I felt would have a strong outcome is how does your home life impact your tendency to join a gang? I chose this question, because I felt this was one of the major reasons why there is so much violence in our different neighborhoods in Boston. I had this feeling that there were many families with distant relationships between parents, and they’re children so teenagers really don’t have anyone to talk to, or someone to look to so they look to the streets for that comfort they don’t get at home. Many teenagers I know struggle with finding that connection with their parents, and they get fed up with trying, and the gang life is their only resort to not feeling wanted. After a while it gets tiring to see young males on the news from gang violence, or some young males dying because of being involved with a gang. So this brought me to choosing my question based upon gangs, and home life, because I feel that’s where it all starts.
Completing this PAR paper, there were different sources to research. Some primary sources used were taking field notes at our internship sites, and basically writing down any little information that I think is important, and will be useful further down in my project. Summarizing different key points, and analyzing to show we got something from observing. Another primary source is interviewing different people with questions that would possibly help me to answer my research question. My role in the interviewing process is to record everything our interviewee says, and write the responses as transcripts to show data collected. Also I, surveying at least fifty teenagers and adults or more on some questions that I feel the answers would make my hypothesis true about my research question. Basically I surveyed teenagers off the streets, in school, at work, teachers, and adults to get every ones opinions on gang life, and home life. A secondary source I used was collecting documents from our internship sites, to get background information about our sites, and there mission to going into helping they’re community. Using these different documents to get a feel of why we were chosen for these sites, and show how these different documents help answer my question. We also are putting a graph in our paper with the Geographic Information System that will show our results from surveying many people. This should be extremely interesting to see the data we collected in some type of graph.
Many of these primary and secondary sources play a major role into completing this PAR project successfully. It’s plenty of information to manage, but it’s worth it, and having all this information to contribute to this project will strengthen this project so much. Finally there comes a reflection process where we think back to the moment we got this research assignment, and what were our instant reactions, because for me I couldn’t have saw myself writing a paper like this, and going through the different steps to leading up to a great paper. The reflection process is the times were you share your personal outlooks on managing this paper, and staying on you game with finishing.