User talk:Julcohn

Welcome!
Hello, Julcohn, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:55, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

Draft note
Hi! I have some notes for your draft:


 * It looks like you're using several studies as sources. The issue with this is that studies are seen as primary sources on Wikipedia for several reasons, which are generally verification and context related. Studies are written by the people who conducted the research, so there's no independent context or verification of the findings in the study. The publisher only checks to ensure that there are no glaring errors that would immediately invalidate the study and they do not actually verify or prove the findings in a way that would make the study non-primary. They also don't provide any sort of commentary, which is important. Studies are fairly limited in scope out of necessity. They can't survey every person because that's both time consuming and costly, so they only survey a relatively small portion of people. As such, the findings are really only true for that group of people and aren't meant to be seen as representative of a larger or the entirety of a group of people. Responses can differ greatly depending on a variety of factors, so a woman in New York may answer differently than a woman in California. Results may also differ depending on the person's wealth, status, ethnicity or race, age, and so on. Even in studies that say that they are based on national data, the data they're working with only came from people who responded - I would wager that there's a large enough group that didn't respond, big enough that they could potentially alter the general findings of the data.
 * The secondary sources are necessary because they can help provide the context needed to fit the findings into the larger picture. They can also provide commentary that can help validate the findings somehow.


 * When writing, make sure that you're not writing persuasively. I would also avoid ending a sentence on the word 'etc', as that is a bit too informal. You also want to avoid phrases like "seems to be", as that comes across as a personal interpretation of the data, which should be avoided. We can only summarize what is in the source. If this is something that is in the source, it needs to be attributed along the lines of "This Person stated that it seems to be...".

I hope that this helps - I think that you picked a great topic to work on and I'm excited to see the final work! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:05, 29 March 2019 (UTC)