After taking your comment into consideration, I think I am going to broaden my research topic into a more general question. I would like to write about the affects of social life on a student and whether it helps them or harms them throughout their college life as well as after graduating. This will allow me talk about the affects of partying, drinking, going out, relationships and other aspects of social which can include the greek life, which is what I originally wanted to talk about. I got this idea after reading the excerpt The Influence of Fraternity and Sorority Involvement by Biddix, Matney, and Norman. Because in their piece, although their main focus is on greek life, they gave me the idea of looking at each aspect of it which is how I decided I wanted to do it on social life as a whole. Because there are many ways a student can look at having a social life and I want to make sure I talk about all of those aspects and it affects them both in college and post graduation. To g
Every semester, I have a student who wants to defend fraternities from the "bad rap" that they get in the press -- from articles like "The Dark Power of Fraternities," for example. But that is more a PR topic than an academic research topic. And even a relatively negative article like "The Dark Power of Fraternities," which eventually discusses the way that fraternities deal with the risks inherent to their party culture, can lead to useful analysis.
ReplyDeleteA very useful resource for locating academic articles related to Greek life is the following bibliography, which you can access through the Rutgers libraries site:
The Influence of Fraternity and Sorority Involvement : A Critical Analysis of Research (1996-2013) by Patrick Biddix, Malinda Matney, and Eric Norman
Try this link, which will work easiest if you are using a Rutgers computer or are logged into the Rutgers system (otherwise it will ask you to log in):
http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/lib/rutgers/detail.action?docID=10843878#?.
See if you can identify an interesting research topic related to Greek life and start reading on that topic. There are definitely ways of representing a positive aspect of Greek life in your paper, but you should focus in on a particular way that Greek life helps students.