Although blogs are largely composed of personal experience and opinions, they are still very useful for academic purposes. They may not be used much for particular data gathering such as studies which would reveal something such as the amount of oil used by the United States in 2009 or the percentage of students being bullied in schools. However, it can still be useful in way such as gathering information of an account of a victim of bullying. This is information which one could use in their study to prove the effect of bullying or the prevalence of bullying.
In my case, I am researching Wicca. I have found a blog post of a practicing wicca and I was able to get an understanding of the mindset of a wiccan. It is comparable to conducting a personal interview. However there are websites, that are well cited and are able to be used fully as scholarly articles. This article, however, is a representation of this person's experience as a Wiccan in america, which is just the kind of information I am looking to discover.
Lionheart, T. (2012, Jan. 29). Discovering Wicca Message posted to http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usca&c=words&id=14819
Hi Caleb,
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this website. It really is a wealth of resources, in particular, personal essays from youth who discovered Wicca. It seems that the people who run this website collect the essays and post them, as opposed to one or two people actually writing the posts themselves.
You are right--there is value in personal stories when it comes to research, especially when there are many of them. A researcher can compare stories from a particular population, find out if common trends emerge or if the stories provide primary evidence to give further support to the results of secondary studies.
Sincerely,
Professor Wexelbaum