Exercise 5.6- Another Dialouge with Dave

In this exercise, Ballenger encourages the reader (me) to have another conversation with Dave who I used in another exercise to see what questions would be asked in my paper. The following are questions that Ballenger provides in the voice of Dave in order for me to assess if I answered all of those questions in my paper and with my research.


Dave:
1.) "Hey you, I think you can't really say that one opinion is better than another one. Don't you agree?"


Me:
1.) I agree with this statement in some instances but in the context of my particular topic, I think that an opinion lies in one's political stance which is involved with a person's morals. I find that the issues that I did my paper on (discrimination and aging out of the foster care Program) are more about right and wrong and advocacy. There may be differing opinions on this topic, but they all tend to be under the common opinion that what I am proposing is morally right.


Dave:
2.) "There's all this stuff in the book about research as a process of discovery. What did you discover?"


Me:
2.) I discovered that there was a lot more work and "digging deeper" that is involved in the research process. I also discovered that it is much easier to assemble a paper when I have evaluated all of my sources and taken sufficient notes on my topic before writing my actual paper


Dave:
3.) "What do you figure was the most challenging problem you had to solve while working on this research project? How did you solve it?"

Me:
3.) The hardest part for me was deciding on a specific issues to focus on in my topic. I had to make sure that I had a decent amount of research on the issues that I chose in order to write about it intelligently. I switched issues about half way through the process because my research was not leading me as deep as I wanted to go on the issues that I chose. So, for me, choosing topics was the hardest thing to do and solidify for my paper because there are so many issues in Foster Care that I could focus my paper on.


Dave:
4.) "After all this work, what do you take away from this experience? What have you learned that you can use?"


4.) I have taken quite a bit of knowledge from this experience that I can take with me into the social work field. This experience had built up awareness in my own perspective as well as the perspective of my readers. It was interesting for me to discover that there is a way for me to fix some of the problems that I discussed in my paper once I become a social worker.