Saturday, February 25, 2012
Finding and Evaluating Facts and Statistics
The previous post is about how to cite facts and statistics to enhance the material’s credibility in speech. Yet how do we know that these facts and statistics are reliable? In our text book, Coopman suggests that some government (@ gov) and organization (@ org) websites are more trustable in the particular fields (136). I remember when I prepared my research paper, whose topic was “Minimum Wage: Survival in Santa Carla County California with Welfare?” for the ESL class. In order to persuade my readers, I did visit many different government departments’ websites as well as researched some of academic institutions’ website (@ edu) to get credible information to support my viewpoint. Even though most commerce websites (@com) are less credible, due to the company’s profit upon anything else, I did cite some facts from media outlets, such as The New York Time. However, I don’t think all over world’s government websites are reliable. Especially, the facts are relating to political views in some communistic countries. Finally, we, as college students, should have a critical thought to be able to evalate an article’s credibility.
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Yes, reliable facts and statistics are "key" in any college assignment. You could start finding your way to reliable sources by stopping in the Sierra College library and speaking to a librarian learning the way to find credible facts and statistics. When I see statistics in articles, I don't take them very seriously because the sampling size of the research group is so small. That small group of people couldn't possible provide accurate statistics for all of the millions of people in the world. There are so many variable to believing any type of story especially one with statistics because statistics can be easily manipulated.
ReplyDeleteI like how you made the point that in the end, as College Student, we must rely on our own critical thinking and background information to determine whether or not a source is credible. When I do research projects, I am so tempted to use wikipedia, or other similar user-created information boards, but in most cases these are the least credible. I try to stick to .gov and .org websites as much as possible. When I do use a regular commerce website, something I use to determine credibility is the date that the information is posted. If it is not updated within the last year or so, I steer clear. I also always cross-reference information to other websites.
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