Fast Food Restaurants and Obesity

725 Words2 Pages

The research process for this essay was complicated and agonizing. I had no idea where to start. As a class, we went to the library and learned how to look up good peer reviewed articles that were reliable sources for our essay. This helped a little, until I had to do it on my own. When I first started looking up different articles based on my topic, I got many articles returned, too many to read through in a short amount of time. The key to narrowing down the amount of articles was to use better key words when I was searching for articles. At first, I was using general key words like obesity and fast food, as those went along with my essay they brought up many articles and none that really interested me enough to read or use in my essay. I started looking up articles the weekend after fall break. I went to the search engine that Jenny Dale showed us in class the Wednesday before fall break. I knew that in order for me to get good reliable sourced articles I would have to use very specific keywords. I looked at my outline for my paper and went paragraph by paragraph. The first paragraph that I actually needed information from would be my fourth paragraph. I knew I wanted to talk about the rate of obesity in America and how it related to income. In the search bar I searched for obesity rates and pressed the scholarly article button to insure I got a peer reviewed article. I scrolled through the different article that came up and Perez Rodrigo article came up about the current mapping of obesity. I clicked on the article, read the summary of it, and realize it was just what I was looking for and decide to use. For the next couple of paragraphs I wanted to compare the location of fast food restaurants in relation to lower incom... ... middle of paper ... ...ut my argument using both point of views and it was also a peer reviewed article. Some challenges I faced was learning how to search for keywords and trying to narrow down the number of articles that were returned. In addition, another challenge was digging through the articles that were return and choosing the articles that worked best and that were in English. Some surprise were about how much calories are in the different meals and how there are so many fast food places and not many healthy food places on a street corner. A dead end I reached was trying to figure out how to use each article thoroughly and how to incorporate it into my paper. Overall, I am glad we got the chance to talk to Jenny Dale from the library because otherwise I do not know how I would of went about my research process or even found any articles that I needed and that were good to use.

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