Sunday, October 12, 2008
Research Log Entries Part A.
The question I tried to answer using google as a search engine, was what are the statistics of drug use among youth. I used: what ARE THE statistics OF drug use among youth?, as the terms in the search engine. I tried capitalizing smaller words such as and and of as a search technique. First off the results of the website are based on a survey given to youths about various questions relating to their drug use, so the results are presented as fact but since it's based on a survey you can't know for sure how accurate the answers given by the youths are accurate and how many provided false information on the given survey. However in the opening paragraph of the presented results of the survey claims that the results of the survey are completely accurate which no information given on a survey could be completely accurate, because we all know that people lie especially on surveys as well as more times than not the questions on surveys tend to be very limited in being applicable to all answering the questions given on the survey. Hence the information given on the results of the National Household Survey are obviously somewhat valuable, but again not completely valuable due to the chances of falsely given information, and the site not being completely valuable due to them claiming that the results are COMPLETELY accurate. Also the date of the survey given on the site was in 2001 so it's not valuable completely to our current time. The article is clearly written and organized though. The site also does have a section for shopping so ultimately they're trying to sell a product or products, trying to get parents mainly to worry about the increasing numbers of drug use among youths and buy products claiming to aid them in combating those problems with their children. So ultimately the information given on the site can't be completely accurate although some of the information probably is true, but they are trying to sell a product so the site can't be completely trusted due to that fact. The question, by how much are they claiming drug use among youths has increased? kept me looking for information given on the question.
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Your search term may not be quite right: what ARE THE statistics OF drug use among youth?
Here's how I'd structure the search:
statistics "drug use" youth
First, the Boolean operators are AND, OR, NOT (or in the case of Google AND NOT). Words such as ARE and THE and OF are not Boolean operators and they are also "common words" that may be ignored by the system (which is good in this case).
The Boolean operator AND is automatically supplied by the system if you don't insert it. So in the string I suggest, the system interprets it as
statistics AND "drug use" AND youth
The system doesn't insert AND between drug and use because I've put the two words in quotation marks to tell the system that I want it to search for this string of characters:
d-r-u-g-blank-u-s-e
Does that help? Is it clearer?
Because the Web is so vast, you got results and you understand the concept of evaluation well.
I know it's hard to catch up when you start late. You're doing great.
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