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Digital Portfolio

https://dylanfrance6.wixsite.com/portfolio

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Maps 3: Theory of Writing

    Before arriving at the university of Denver, I assumed that I had a lot of writing experience and considered myself an efficient writer. After completing the required writing classes this year, I encountered a problem that I haven’t in the past: finding purpose. It��s very simple to write pages and pages on a topic you know a lot about. For example, humans love to talk/write about themselves, so this is why blogs have become popular in recent history. Through identifying the purpose, writers can identify what is necessary to write effectively.

   To represent purpose in a three-dimensional diagram, I created the man parachuting shown above. The ideology behind this is that the parachute serves as an important purpose seeing it keeps the man from death. In writing, you need to identify the purpose that the piece serves. Once that is accomplished, you will be able to easier define the audience, style, and rhetorical situation. Also, identifying the purpose keeps the overall goal clear. Pieces of writing that bounce all over the place and lose track of the main idea are not effective in communicating to the audience. This all prepares you to write an amazing piece that fits the job because the purpose was identified.

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Research Journal: Week 8

    If I counted all the hours I worked on this research paper, I’m sure it’d be upwards of 100 hours and I’ll fight you if you think I’m lying. Whether it was observing four hours instead of one or slaving away in the library to perfect the lit review, I put in the time necessary to gather information and complete the research project. To be honest, I’ve walked into every writing class thinking it will be a walk in the park with my speech writing background. Papers that take my friends four hours to finish take me less than two. Accordingly, it was a slap in the face when starting this project because I discovered most of the time is spent in the research process.

    I learned much more from the research process than that it takes a lot of time. The biggest thing I took away was the ability to make connection and identify trends in data. Since I was limited in what I was allowed to ask in my interview and survey, I had to look very close to find these connections. This also taught me that anything is researchable just the findings are vaguer and less specific. Because anything is researchable, it forces you to be very creative with the way that you observe. Also, observing is much more than just what you see. It’s detailing interactions between people, what you feel, and any use of the five senses. From the writing, I learned that there isn’t BSing this. You have to know your primary research and secondary research inside and out to write intelligently about your topic and make connections.

    I took a lot away from this project while also tiring myself out to a point of exhaustion. In the future, I plan to use these skills over and over on each research project I do.

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Transfer of Writing Knowledge

     Throughout our learning process, we have applied previously learned concepts to new ones. Perkins and Salomon use the example where learning to drive a car makes learning to drive a stick shift an easier process. It’s often found in mathematics and is referred to as the transfer of learning. It happens subconsciously in some situations, but school curriculum allows students to make the connections more quickly. A problem occurs when student change curriculums. A big example of this is college. Specifically at this university, students are coming in from all over the country from states with different teaching methods. Everyone had different teachers that decided what was important for their students to learn. It’s very stupid that the only thing we use to determine prior intelligence is an ACT/SAT score. The writing section isn’t even required for admission here so writing classes are especially screwed by the change from high school to college.

     While in college, student have the tendency to repeat what they did four years ago and not care about what they learn their first year. Everyone is too busy meeting new people, trying to fit in, and making lasting friendships. I truly believe this is a very important process because mental health can be affected when a student moves away from home and doesn’t make new relationships to feel support. Problems arise when student are expected to transfer knowledge from their first year when they didn’t try and partied four nights a week. When it comes to writing, Bergmann and Zepernick told us, “Although the students in our study admitted to resisting and rejecting much of what their teachers may have hoped they would learn in composition classes, they nonetheless clearly perceived themselves as writers and saw writing as part of their professional work.” This is good and bad because confidence is a good thing, but not having knowledge to transfer from resisting is not.

     After college is when transfer is the most difficult because of specialization. For example, you go to work for a company that does a specific task where you are assigned smaller tasks that all lead up to the big picture. You might only be transferring a certain amount of learning to complete your assigned tasks. The hope is that, through this class, I will be able to do it quicker now that I have learned its importance. In my writing, I hope to transfer my ability to identify the audience and organization. These both allow me to write effectively and efficiently. I’m definitely happy I took this class because I learned a lot about the research process compared to others. Transferring this will benefit me in my future classes and career. The transfer happens without us knowing; however, identifying it allows you to complete the process easier to achieve success.

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MAPS 2: Communication

     Communication plays a gigantic role in writing to get ideas across as well as extending your own knowledge. It’s often used in the research process to expand one’s knowledge before writing. Our reading on the “Survivor Spoilers” gives a great example of how people communicated to predict events in the hit series. These people communicated, combined research, and accurately predicted the show because of this communication. 

     Communication is also affected by several factors that many do not realize. The first one I have identified is the audience that you are reaching out to. The Vatz reading tells us that we must identify the audience we are writing to in order to communicate the message correctly. An academic audience obviously calls for educated word choice and clear organization, whereas a blog post to people online allows for more flexibility in what you say and how you say it. 

     In my writing, I’ve identified how communication is basically the main goal. In the past, I’ve only associated communication as a conversation between people that’s rapid fire and similar to texting. However, even a 200 page research project is communication, just the text message ran a little long lol. Communication is really just the transfer of ideas and thoughts which is represented in my map by the people connecting brains to come to a conclusion. In the future, I hope to use communication to my advantage to improve how I get a point across. I believe that I have fantastic ideas; I just need to be able to express them the way they make sense in my brain. 

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Research Journal: Week 7

    Primary research this week has been actually very enjoying given my topic. Attending ZBTahiti and Mustache Bash was a very awesome way to conduct observations. The main observation I wanted to pull from these two was the reaction of the audience to the music. To be blunt, what I observed was many incoherent college kids jumping, screaming, and dancing to electronic music for 2 hours. I noted that the audience’s energy always increased when they knew the lyrics and at peak moments of songs referred to as “drops.” I took a lot of notes nonchalantly on my phone and am looking forward to coding it tomorrow.

    In my survey results, I’m finding that the most popular genre is rap among people surveyed, yet they’ve attended less than three concerts of this genre in the past year. This leads me to believe that people are attending EDM/Dance concerts more since this genre was most popular when asked what genre the last live music event they attended was. I believe that this, along with other results, will prove that certain genres are more enjoyable on drugs.

    I’m finishing up my last interview tomorrow with someone who has attended more music festivals that anyone I know in my life. He’s been to famous ones like Tomorrowland, EDC, and Burning Man. I hope and believe that he will provide a lot of insight for my research. Looking forward to coding in class on Tuesday and hopefully I find something.  

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Transfer of Learning Response

    It began even before we all walked through the doors of our kindergarten class and continues through today: the learning process. As everyone continues to learn, we apply previously learned concepts to new ones. As Perkins and Salomon tell us, “Learning to drive a car helps a person later to learn more quickly to drive a truck, learning mathematics prepares students to study physics…” This is called the transfer of learning and is commonly found in the educational process. Even in college, students will use elementary concepts to solve harder problems every day.

    We learn from Perkins and Salomon that there are positive and negative forms of transfer. Positive transfer is when previously learned concepts ease the learning process of a new concept. This is the more common form of transfer because we can identify, or are taught, what previously learned concepts aid a new process. Negative transfer is when a previously learned concept acts negatively on a new process. Perkins and Salomon use the example of languages (Different sentence structure causes Chinese to be much more difficult to learn if one’s first language is English). Coding, a language of its own, also faces this problem depending on if someone has previously learned JavaScript, Python, or a different one. The transfer of learning is also much easier if the distance between the new concept and the previously learned one is close. For example, just because a person can play battleship doesn’t mean that he or she is fit to be a general. That person only knows basic levels of strategy.

   An example I identified this year is the process of learning to ski. Since the fourth grade, I have snowboarded, but my family would only go once a year. After coming to Colorado for school, I decided to switch to skiing as it has become more popular. I applied the previously learned concept of carving to master this new skill. It was a pretty close transfer, but I did struggle as it was two pieces of wood under my feet compared to one. In my writing class, I use the previously learned concepts from my secondary research and apply it when forming the questions for my survey and interview. This way, I can ask the correct questions to get the information I want. In the writing portion, I use the tips that KT gives to improve my writing through looking at elements of rhetoric like audience, persuasion, and constraints. The transfer of learning is used every day because it allows us to understand and grasp new concepts.

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Research Journal: Week 6

    Well, my primary research did not go as planned. When we were picking topics at the beginning of the quarter, I really wish I would have known the restrictions we face when gathering primary research. Choosing a topic about something you like has the benefit of being interested in your research, but I’m learning the downsides as we dive further in. I cannot use any of my questions from my first try at the survey. That really sucks…… a lot. So, my next step with my primary research was to fix the questions.

    With the survey, despite it being anonymous, I can’t directly ask questions about illegal activity like drug use. This requires the person taking the survey to in a sense, “plead guilty.” My questions are now all changed to ask about the live music event experience. This way, the people taking the survey are allowed to put the true answer in the personal response. My questions with personal response are asking personal questions. The questions that have answers to choose from are all about other people and activities at the last live music event they went to. I think I found a way to get valuable information from the survey.

    On the interview questions, I’m going to focus those on the overall mood of the interviewee’s favorite live music event. I will ask them about their personal opinions on the mood. Asking a person about their favorite live music event versus the last one they went to is a good idea because it will lead to more interesting conversation and better information. Everyone loves to talk about a great experience, so I believe this is the best way to conduct my interviews.

   My observations are awesome and do not need to change. Let’s just say I’m REALLY looking forward to soberly watching live music.

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Poster Page

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Self-Analysis

    After pouring in the most hours I’ve ever spent on a paper this year, I finally have a great idea of what I’m trying to accomplish with this lit review. I know that my overall goal is provide the audience with the necessary information needed to understand the importance of my research and to clear up anything that might be disregarded as common knowledge. My audience must know the effects of common “party drugs” to understand their relationship and effects on music. I do this through a detailed explanation as my first point/idea. The audience also has to know that there is scientific proof that a relationship between drugs and music exists. This is what asks the big question if drugs are influenced by music or if drugs influence music. I provide evidence through studies, historic examples, and other research.

   Another big part of this lit review is my purpose beyond the assignment. I want to draw my audience in with extremely interesting studies and historic examples. They should be dying to skip to my research results before I even start the methods. I truly believe this is an extremely interesting and relevant topic in the world we live in today.

    I spent a lot of hours in the library, came to class, and got great feedback. Going forward, I want to make sure that I provide intelligent and factual research to prove my point. Another thing I want to improve on is my parenthetical documentation. I hope that is all correct when you have more than one author.

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Threshold Concept Part 2

It's important to find motivation for your writing

    Finding motivation to write is something I face whenever I’m instructed on what to write. For example, something I enjoy doing is blogging every now and then about something on my mind. Most times I don’t even post these blogs, but they serve as a way for me to discuss something on my mind and know that I won’t be judged for my opinions. I can usually punch out a 1000-word blog in under and hour, yet in the same amount of time, I can only complete a 250-word response to a reading. This is due to the fact that motivation is low for the response and high when I need to get something off my chest. Another great example of how motivation affects writing is this post right now. I spent a good portion of my day pouring effort into my lit review, so I struggle to be motivated when writing this. James Moffett and Ann Berthoff say that writing comes from full engagement of the entire writer. Gaining motivation leads to full engagement because the writer wants to be there.

    In order to gain motivation and become fully engaged, you must change the writing slightly in any way so you can enjoy what you write. For example, when assigned the lit review, I wasn’t actually looking forward to being forced to write 7-9 pages based on research. What I did was select a topic that interests me. Before I knew it, I was searching for more sources than I needed and writing more pages than required.

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Research Journal: Week 5

    Week five went much better than week four! I was able to meet with Dr. KT and clear up any confusion I had. My research is solid and my lit review will be ready for Tuesday. Now that I have successfully completed secondary research, it’s time to shift my focus to primary research including my survey, interviews, and observations.

Survey:

    For my survey, I will need to utilize surveymonkey.com to reach out to people other than those at the University of Denver. My target audience that I hope to survey is young adolescents that have attended live music events or music festivals. These people will be able to provide the best information for my primary research. These are the questions I hope to ask them:

1.     Have you taken a “rave” or “party drug” at a live music event in the past year?

a.      Yes

b.     No

2.     (If multiple, choose one) What was the genre of music at this event?

a.      List of genres

3.     Do you believe that taking this drug abled you to have a better time?

a.      Yes

b.     No

4.     If you could re-experience this concert, would you take the same drug, a different drug, or no drugs?

a.      Same

b.     List of Drugs

c.      No drugs

5.     Did you decide to take this drug before or after purchasing the ticket?

a.      Before

b.     After

6.     If you were given a certain “rave drug”, would you choose a certain genre of music based on the feeling you get from the drug?

a.      Yes

b.     No

Interviews:

   Interviewing about drugs should be fun. Right now, the idea I have is to interview two people who have experience attending live music events where drug use is common and possibly an artist/performer. From the interviews, I hope to gain knowledge on the atmosphere and audience at these events with these questions:

1.     Have you attended a live music event in the past year? Describe the genre of music, who performed, and where it was held.

2.     How would you describe the drug use at this event?

3.     How did the drug use at this event compare to other events you’ve been to?

4.     In your opinion, why was drug use common or uncommon at this event?

5.     How did the drug use affect the overall mood of the audience?

Observations:

  I guess there is only one way to observe this research question: take a bunch of drugs and go to a rave! Just kidding. I do intend to observe two live music events, but I will remain sober to make the most accurate observations. To create a comparison, the two live music events I go to will be different genres. The first will most likely be at Club Beta. I have been to events here before and let’s just say it’s a good place to observe a lot of people on drugs dancing to EDM music. They also have famous DJs come in every weekend. The other observation I plan to complete is attending a Gnash concert. This is May 3rd at the Summit Music Hall. I believe this event will act as a good contrast since it’s a different genre and in a different location.

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Primary Research Practice: Friday Classes

Two years ago, the University of Denver added Friday classes in an effort to improve their image and stimulate educational growth in their students. When talking, Jake, Madi, and I agreed that none of this has been accomplished. So, despite the addition of Friday classes, does DU still remain a ghost town on these day?

Methods:

In order to conduct our research, we knew that we were going to have to look at the target audience: DU students. We began with observations to reassure our hypothesis. On Thursday and Friday of last week, we observed the area in front of Sturm Hall. Many classes are taught in Sturm and it’s a popular place for tabling which attracts students. This is why we believed this area would act as a great sample of DU. We observed two different time frames (9:50-10:05 and 11:50-12:05) on each day to provide the best representation. These time frames are when classes switch causing the most people to walk by our observation area.

We wanted to conduct an interview with a DU student that often faces scheduling issues with Friday classes. For this reason, the person we chose was Hadley Michaels. She is a professional skier and full time student, so one can easily see where problems might arise. We wanted to ask her questions pertaining her attendance on Fridays and any conflicts she faces.

Our survey was a great way to collect information from people with different majors, schedules, and social lives. To do this, we utilized surveymonkey.com because it’s an effective way to survey through technology and remain anonymous. One piece of information we wanted to get out of the survey was the common reason for skipping. Is it due to kids going out on Thursday nights? Is is due to pure laziness? Also, we wanted to know if people are more likely to skip Friday class than any other day of the week. The last question we wanted to ask was opinion-based asking whether students would rather have more hours of class each day, but only for 4 days of the week or have less hours of class each day spread over 5 days of the week?

Results:

After conducting primary research, our survey, observations, and interview provided impressive results. Through our survey we found that most students will miss Friday classes due to their consumption of alcohol. Hangovers were the main reason why people missed their classes on Fridays. With 92.31% of people responding “too hungover,” it is prevalent that alcohol has a very high effect on students attending class on Fridays. Also attributing to this finding, Hadley Michaels commented on the fact that alcohol contributes to her missing classes when she said, ”I also like going out on Thursday nights which makes it more difficult to make it to Friday classes. ”

Another reason our survey participants were missing class on Fridays was because they were “too lazy”. 53.85% of the people who participated in the poll chose this answer, showing friday classes were not a strong priority for them. In addition, 100% of our students in our survey said they are more likely to miss a class just because it is on Friday.m

As we saw when observing Driscoll Green, there was much more student activity on Thursdays than on Friday. On Thursday, we observed upward of 500 students attending classes in Sturm and only 80 to 100 students attending classes in Sturm on Friday. Our survey showed that 86.67% of students would rather have more hours of class 4 days a week rather than the 13.3% who prefer having less hours of class each day spread over 5 days a week. Both of statistics showing that a vast majority of DU students would prefer not to have a class on Friday.

Discussion:

We noted some connections we made between our research and results. One of the main reasons Denver eliminated Friday classes was to “help curb student alcohol abuse, which the letter, dated May 7, states has lead to increased incidents of sexual assault,” according to the Denver Clarion. However, our survey shockingly proved that eliminating Friday classes didn’t actually solve the drinking problem with 92.31% of kids reporting they were too hungover for class. The problem grew when we discovered that 84.62% of students have missed at least one friday class this year. Maybe implementing Friday classes makes the school look better as a whole, but it clearly isn’t helping students.

Friday classes even have hindered student athletes like Hadley Michaels who stated, “Friday classes often interfere with my skiing competition schedule as well.” She went on to inform us that the school doesn’t even do anything to accommodate her when she stated, “For the most part they do not. It is really difficult for me to find the perfect schedule that doesn’t interfere with my professional skiing. Especially since I am an art major and there are less classes with even less time options.” This is clearly an issue because students on participating sports teams here at Denver not only receive help with their scheduling, but they also get to register early. So it makes sense that we found that nearly 50% of students have missed class on Friday for skiing, snowboarding, or outdoor activities.

So why are we implementing Friday classes if so many people are absent for them? A newsletter that all DU professors received two years earlier from Provost Gregg Kvistad regarding the implementation of Friday classes starting winter quarter of the 2014-15 academic year stated that students not having class on Friday roots to “a significant level of intellectual disengagement among our students for three of the seven days of the week and, in turn, a weakening of the University’s academic culture.” Well, congratulations! You went from zero students attending class on Fridays to 80 hungover students lazily crawling to classes that are half-empty when they arrive. Clearly not comparable to the nearly 500 students that were seen on a Thursday afternoon.

Although the school of Denver implemented Friday classes to restrict drinking and show visiting donors our school is not filled with “no signs of life, let alone a vibrant and intense academic community with people coming and going from classes, lectures or the myriad other activities we engage in during the rest of the week,” our research has proved the inverse. Thank you.

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Check in on Group Project

     By Friday, our group had completed the observation portion of this research practice. In class, we wanted to pick a topic that would be easy to get primary research here on campus. Jake noted that he hasn’t seen anybody heading to class on Fridays lately. Madi and I agreed, so we decided to ask this question: despite adding Friday classes, is DU a ghost town on Fridays?

     For the observation portion of this practice, our group chose to observe on Thursday and Friday to have something to compare Fridays to. Also, we wanted to observe a common area where you would find students walking to class between periods. We chose Driscoll Green because of the many classes taught in Sturm and because it’s a popular place for tabling which attracts more students. We thought it was appropriate to observe the same time frame on both Thursday and Friday, so we chose the time frames from 9:50 - 10:05 and from 11:50 - 12:05. 

     After observing, we found that there were many more people headed to class on Thursdays. It was too difficult to count every person on Thursday, but we estimated there to be between 300 - 500 students. On Friday, counting students was much easier recording  40 - 50 students at the 10:00 class change and 50 - 60 students at the 12:00 class change. We will use these observations, with our survey and interview, to hopefully come to a conclusion on whether or not DU is a ghost town on Fridays despite adding Friday classes.

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Week 4: Research Journal

    Over the past week, I had a lot of positives and negatives when writing the lit review. Sadly, the negative side of this is that I didn’t do it correctly; however, the positive side is that I gained better knowledge on my research project. I think the best thing to do in this situation is to focus on the positive secondary research I did.

    One of the things I gained better knowledge on is the history of the relationship between drug use and music. I learned that it started with jazz musicians in the 1940’s doing heroin, or “smack,” and making music that paralleled the feeling. This continued throughout the decades after. What I really wanted to research more on was one of the first music festivals where drug use was very common: Woodstock. A popular article on The Guardian titled Chemical Bonds talks of the introduction of “uppers” and the high tempo music associated with that. That article later has a quote from Rod Stanley, editor of Dazed & Confused magazine, supporting one side of this question saying, “If a new drug were discovered today, a new music scene would spring up overnight.” Another topic I better educated myself on is the brain’s reaction to drugs and music. I made a hypothesis about this connection. I learned in one of my sources that the release of dopamine in the brain is what creates the great feeling from drugs. The sense of euphoria makes a person feel better than a thirty-minute back massage. This release of dopamine also occurs when experiencing the emotional peaks of music. Therefore, I hypothesis that drug use is so common at live music events. It was also interesting to learn different dopamine receptors are larger than others depending on the drug. For example, the dopamine receptor for cocaine is very large and this is why addiction is common with cocaine.

    It was great to get a lot of information out of the secondary research process and I look forward to completing the rest of it and correcting my lit review.

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Threshold Concepts and MEMES

    Threshold concepts have the ability to open up a new way to understand, view, or interpret something. In the reading, different threshold concepts of writing are discussed and they all make me say to myself, “Wow, I never thought of that.” When comparing these concepts with what I’ve learned in KT’s writing class, I noticed that two of them made more of a connection that the rest.

    The first threshold concept that I connected to is that every part of writing is a process. IT TAKES TIME! “…many writing abilities, such as choosing the most appropriate and precise word, and exercising good judgement in deciding whether to quote directly or to paraphrase in any given writing situation, cannot be learned just once.” I believe this is true because, unlike math, writing does not have one answer. Five plus two equals seven, but there’s a million-different way you can write about any given topic. Writing takes time to do it correctly and you still might be wrong. I made the connection between this idea and why Dr. KT doesn’t give grades. Even a good piece of writing that deserves an A can be improved; therefore, we must take time to develop the best possible work. The other connection I made to our writing class is the final portfolio we do at the end that includes more than one piece of writing. “… [This threshold Concept] enables us to recognize that it is impossible to make a valid judgement of a student writer’s ability by examining a single sample of his or her writing, particularly a sample of writing that does not address a specific rhetorical situation.”

    The second threshold concept that I connected with is one of the most important steps in the writing process: revision. “In the same way that writing is not perfectible, writing also is not in the category of things that are often right the first time.” This is why we must go to others for help and advice to improve. We have done this in class with our research proposals. I worked with Beth and Oswaldo and they helped bring in other ideas while also making sure I clarify certain aspects of the proposal. Last quarter, my writing professor didn’t make an effort to meet individually with him. This quarter, I’ve already had one conference with KT and we are having another one later this week. These are great times to get some constructive feedback and ask questions about your personal work. All examples of revision are great because everyone looks at something differently. “The expectation of revision--the building of time into a writing process—creates both the opportunity for, and sometimes directly prompting for, looking at the text again, differently.

    Threshold concepts bring a new way of looking at something which expands knowledge of a given topic. They aid us in our writing process and play a big part in finding success in your writing.

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Research Journal: Week 3

     After the helpful session in the library on Tuesday, I was able to use the resources we were given to aid my research process. I found both academic articles and popular articles that present information pertaining to my research question: do the drugs young people take influence the live music events they attend or do these events influence the drugs they take?

     The first article I found is titled “A cross-sectional survey of young people attending a music festival: associations between drug use and musical preference.” From the title, one can already tell this article sounds very similar to my topic. The authors investigated associations between music genres and drug use as well as the popularity of illicit drug use among attendees at music festivals, clubs, concerts, and raves in Australia. One thing I like about this article is that it includes the different forms of live music; however, they analyze way to many drugs which I believe caused them to not come to an answer. I want to focus my research specifically on common drugs. The researchers also did not use an anonymous survey to collect information so I believe that might have affected their results.

     The second article that caught my eye is titled “Drug use and nightlife: More than just dance music.” It explores the concept that certain variables of a live music event affect the use of popular drugs like alcohol, MDMA, cannabis, cocaine, and amphetamines. These authors believe that factors like an event being outside affect drug use more than music genre. I like this article because it presents the opposite argument of my topic and opens my mind to how those variables could create bias on my results. It’s important to consider all possible views when beginning your research. This secondary research we started has already had a positive impact on my process and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here!