Research Proposal

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As of right now I have a couple of different, interconnected topics that I want to research. I’m planning to focus my paper on the topic of suicide. I also plan to address some related topics like sexual assault, bullying, depression, and the teaching of sensitive topics. I really like the research questions Madison added to the Google doc, “How could the portrayal of suicide potentially further influence young adults to want to commit suicide? How do writers and other kinds of influencers prevent themselves from unknowingly glorifying suicide and making it more of an action that readers and viewers are LESS likely to want to commit?” Some other questions I’ll be posing during my research are: What are the long lasting effects of sexual assault? What are the long lasting effects of systematic bullying? What can schools do to help? Do current antibullying systems help or hurt students? Should schools have trained psychologists to work with students who struggle with mental health issues? I’m anticipating that most of my resources will come from the school’s databases. As always I know I should be looking for current research but with this topic it’s a given that most of these resources will be relatively new as these are topics that have recently been brought to the forefront. The only challenge I foresee is being able to find articles that discuss the topics I want to learn/write about in a semi-isolated manner. I know a lot of these topics relate to lots of other topics so I foresee some challenges in trying to weed through sources that may seem related to my topic but mainly focus on something outside the realm of MY focus points.

I’ve selected this topic because now more than ever suicide is an issue that needs to be talked about. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among adolescents. Issues like bullying and sexual assault are at an all time high as well. I want to explore how these issues can be improved at an institutional level. I also want to explore media influence on these issues. It seems like the Netflix rendition of 13 Reasons Why has caused a lot of controversy. Before the series came out, hardly anyone was talking about the book. I plan to focus mainly on the text 13 Reasons Why but I also plan to pull from Speak and All the Bright Places. I will possibly address The House on Mango Street and/or Crank.


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