Blog Week 2 - Finding and reading relevant literature

Finding and reading relevant literature

Having read over the position paper topics two weeks ago I was instantly drawn to the option to argue for mandatory immunisation of children prior to enrolment in a school or pre-school. Having an almost three year old daughter who has been in full time day care since she was six months old my partner and I are acutely aware of the impact her day to day environment could have on her health. I am staunchly pro-vaccination as none of the concerns the anti-vaccination material I read had any truth or carried any weight after further digging, we did look into a few initially worrying statements but these fell flat in the light of proper research. That said, I am attempting to approach this assignment with an unbiased start point as best I can.

I began brainstorming for my position paper using the two column approach given in the "How to write a position paper" PDF but quickly realised that I didn't understand the argument against mandatory vaccination prior to school/pre-school enrolment as well as I should as I found it hard to find counter arguments to my pro-mandatory vaccination points. But among my research for clarification on what the opposing arguments were I stumbled across the site ProCon.org, which touts itself as "the leading source for pros & cons of controversial issues". As a resource for finding what the basic arguments for and against my topic before any real primary or secondary literature research was undertaken I found it helpful.

I migrated my brainstorming list to a table in a word document to track the for and against arguments and slowly started collecting the supporting links to papers, articles etc. to add to each table cell so I always have a reference back to my initial research. Much of the material I've collected so far is tertiary literature with a smattering of primary and secondary but I intend to jump down each of the rabbit holes in the lesser literature and find the primary research it's claiming to cite (if any at all). This is a fraught topic and so much of the material found is extremely emotive and rarely ever balanced (even a lot of pro-vaccination material is somewhat uneven-handed).

Now I plan to read a lot of the sciblogs.co.nz articles to get a feel for the writing style, along with some New Scientist and Scientific American which I've just gotten setup on my kindle. Over the coming week I'm going to trawl through as much related primary literature associated with the main points I've highlighted for argument.


Comments

  1. Zinettie ClarkAugust 10, 2017 at 9:50 PM

    Hey Evan,

    Its good that you have decided to take a non-biased approach with this assignment, I recon you will gain some more insight into the different arguments that might relate to your parenting.
    Awesome blog post, and all this best with this assignment.

    Cheers,
    Zinettie

    ReplyDelete

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