Reference past essays

[aridge02]

I'm doing a topic on internet psychology about how adolescents say an do things differently in an online community versus an offline community.

My question is that would it be wrong to reference past essays (such as the ones on http://www.tedbursa.k12.tr/ib/html/pyschology.html) or would it be more acceptable to find the reference in the essay look that up and so.

Edited August 15, 2010 by aridge02

[Sandwich]

Look up the original location of the reference

You should do this for academic reasons anyway. Whenever you see something in a paper you can't know for sure that it's 100% accurate, even if they have referenced something. There are so many ways to take comments and statistics out of context and so if you want to be academically stringent, you shouldn't be using any second hand sources where there are first hand sources available. Being honest, if nothing else, it's a bit of a risk to yourself -- if the person making the reference misquoted or got the wrong end of the stick about something, and the examiner has actually read the original piece of work, your essay is going to look pretty suspicious.

[JoeG]

Yes, I would also advise that you look up the original source of the quotation.

If you really had to, you could reference past essays that are in a print source (book, anthology, whatever) as long as they aren't IB essays lol.

[blindpet]

I second (third?) what everybody said. Definitely read the referenced works and make sure this person made the correct interpretation. Never reference essays from any sites that aren't published works in an academic journal or book - preferably articles in a journal. I think your topic is interesting . By the way, you have the chance to be creative with some of your evaluation points while referencing other academic papers - e.g. teasing online vs offline by referencing a study that deals with personality types and their penchant for teasing - if that makes sense.

[aridge02]

Well I already have how I want to lay out my essay. It's about how adolescents say and do things differently online vs offline, so I was gonna focus on how people act differently to make themselves to look better and true self vs actual self, . All I really have to do is research.

EDIT: I took online deception out as a third topic and moved it to as a detail for the first fact.

Edited August 20, 2010 by aridge02

[blindpet]

So you're doing it on the intention-action gap? Which studies are you planning on using? You'll find some here that may be of some use. If you need any academic papers I might be able to help you out.

Edited August 22, 2010 by blindpet

[aridge02]

Am I? Unfortunately I have not heard of the intention action gap until you mentioned it.