P3 Research

For the in class activities, I brainstormed the topics of drug use of college students and how it affects them, if students with test anxiety experience more anxiety closer to the date of the test, and if light color affects mood. I am interested in art and the influence it has on people, music and its influence in society, and the human mind and psychology. I am going to go outside the topic of Ethics in Higher Education as my topic does not concern that. My research question is are zoos ethical. While it is a jump to this topic from my original ideas and likes, I arrived at this topic by talking with others in my hall. We were recently discussing zoos and how the majority of us find them cruel to hold animals in captivity. I became interested to see if there was further evidence on if zoos are ethical and decided this would be a good topic to write about for P3. Also, I feel like this is a currently relevant and talked about subject because of the talk about Sea World and Harambe. My overall theme is how ethical it is to hold animals in captivity and my topic for the issue is going to be the ethics behind zoos. Potential stakeholders include the animals held in captivity, zoo owners and operators, and those who help zoos run, like feed and animal capturing companies. I am most appealed to directing the paper towards the zoo owners because they are the ones that hold the most stake in the issue. They are also the ones that have the most power in the continuation, change in, or dismantling of zoos. I would like to convince a resistant stakeholder, because their mind is already thinking about both sides and may need just a little push or extra information to make a decision.

My concerns moving into P3 include not being able to find enough scholarly information about the issue and not having enough to write about because of the lack of information available. I am also concerned I will find too much information on one side of the issue and not enough information supporting the other viewpoints, as this will lead to a one sided paper. To address these concerns I will use what I learned during the library day to better search for information and scholarly sources. Through searching for information from different sources and on different platforms I will be able to find a vast amount of information. Hopefully by finding many sources of information I will be able to find support for all sides and views of the issue allowing me to write a well rounded paper that addresses all sides of the issue. I think having peer review days that focus on if the paper is addressing enough on all sides of the argument and how convincing it is. I think it will help to have other read the paper especially because it is so long.