The Problems Faced By Young People Today Compared To Older Generations In Essay.

Review the reflective goals and figure out how you can incorporate your work this semester to write a reflective essay.  Your focus is to explain the evolution of your research project process and why you made specific writing and revision choices in your project.

Consider your reflective writing as a letter to your readers explaining to them why and how your port meets the course goals.  In order to do that, you will need to reference (and cite) your research project to give your readers specific evidence and why that evidence meets the project goals.  If you went to the Writing Center or used other resources, feel free to incorporate that, but make sure you explain specifically why and how those resources were helpful to you in your writing process.

From my research, I have found out that the young people of the current generation face numerous problems compared to the older generation young people. These problems are attributed to both economic, social, political and mostly technological factors. Modern technologies have made information access and communication easier for the youth today. With these new technologies, the lifestyles of the young people today have greatly been changed in terms of dressing styles, socializing as well as eating habits. These modern technologies are misconceived to have simplified life for the youth today. However, this is not the case, as highlighted in the research article that I just completed.

As a student, it was quite easy for me to recognize and identify the specific problems faced by today’s youth since I fall within the age bracket of the youth today, that is to say,I am in the current young generation. However, the main challenge was to compare them with those of the older generations. My intention of doing the project was to recollect the experiences that I have gathered as a teenager, and put them to use, and in deed they helped me a great deal to identify the problems of the youth today. Besides my personal teen experiences, I got immense help from elders both within as well as outside my family, all of whom acknowledged the differences and helped me to form a critical judgment of both.  The assistance I got from the elders and my family members enabled me make strong comparison between the challenges faced by the young people today and those of the older generation. After forming the critical judgement, I was able to develop the strategic structure that I would follow in carrying out the research and finally writing down the report. I wrote my first draft from which I realized that my opinion was being largely shaped by secondary sources, instead of concentrationg on my own personal opinions. I approached some elderly people and inquired from them about the major problems  that they faced during their teenage years or as youths. They were so cooperative and from them I got some points which I compared with my own personal experiences of problems as a teenager today. After this, I revised the draft using more analysis from my personal life experiences, the information I got from the elders I interviewed and the information form the secondary sources. My revised draft seemed to adequately capture the project purpose, incapacitating both the challenges of the current young generation and the older young generation as well as comparizon of these challenges.

Research Methodology

I had full faith in my overall strategy that it would work out perfectly well and help me meet the objectives of the project, although I had to make some changes later on. I went through some quality articles that I perceived to contain the relevant information on the research topic. This helped me understand these problems beyond my personal experience, rather than just having a generalized idea of the complexities faced by the people of  the two generations. Prior to this, I had to do a background check on the authenticity of the articles so as not to be misguided into forming false opinions using irrelevant sources. From my analysis of the article sources, I narrowed down to six particular articles which I thought would be helpful in the formation and presentation of the problems pertaining to generational gaps, technology and other problems related to the young people today in comparison with the young people in the older generation.

I then carefully studied these articles having in mind the main topic of the project. The vast repository of knowledge which I gathered through this extensive study brought upon me a little challenge, in the initial phases, of how to form the outline of the article. By perrusing through different research papers online, and going through my lecture notes, I managed to get an idea of how to form the outline of my article. I wrote down the article structure. Through this structure I was able to get an idea of the requirements of the article based on the different parts of the article as outlined.

Another challenge arose when doing analysis of the different articles containing related information on the study topic, to select the best articles to use. But the structure of ‘Annotated Bibliography’ came to my rescue. It helped me to focus on the major points within each article, and address them from a critical perspective, while at the same time, linking them with my own opinions about the study topic, ‘The problems faced by young people today compared to the young people in the older generation’. However, I was still deviating from the main topic, when doing the analysis of the sources to use, by sometimes putting more of my own opinions than could be included in context of the article under examination.  It was with much effort that I achieved a perfect balance of both, my opinions and the contents of the article under examination. Once I got over this problem, the movement through the paper became easier. By the end, I was able to achieve a balanced and rational structure of the article as well as the content, that is, without basing so much concentration on my personal opinions at the expense of the article sources or favoring much of the article sources and ignoring my own personal opinions. I actually managed to reason out in the context of what many other writers had layed out adding to my opinions as well.

Identification of Relevant Sources

I got my initial ideas by generally surfing through the internet. But the open internet did not give me the detailed information I needed, since I realized that I needed to form more critical ideas about the topic. I opted not to wholly rely on the open internet. Certain articles from the Google Scholar were so helpful that I had to closely examine their contents. I had a variety of articles to use, but through thorough analysis of their contents in relation to the study topic, I had to narrow down to six artices I considered helpful towards addressing the topic. While narrowing down on six particular articles, I had to reluctantly omit a few. This is because, although they were valuable in shaping my opinions, the ideas they predominantly presented were similar.

Giving an example of two sources I used. First, the point raised by Sharlene Gale and Graeme Codington in the article “Facing the Youth in the 21st Century” about the causal relationship of obesity with the mental and physical health of today’s youth, offered a fresh perspective to me, which I had never thought about before. To quote my own writing, “obesity disrupts the mental equilibrium of the young generation that the people of the previous generation did not have to face” best describes my learning of this new perspective.

Secondly,the authors Richard, Fry, Ruth Igielnik and Eileen Patten in the article “How Millennials today compare with their grandparents 50 years ago” dwell on the problem of unemployment which is being faced by the present generation people. The article brings out the fact that millennial men prove to be better in terms of education than that of the earlier generation of the young men.  This article has helped in providing the statistics pertaining to millennial and the silent generation that has helped in revealing important aspects related to the changes that have taken place in the society. All these sources were really helpful as they provided a perfect mixture of history, the current state of affairs and the possible future challenges, all pertaining to the research topic.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I am pretty much pleased how the research paper has taken shape. It was a very endearing learning experience for me, from where I got to know a lot more about issues pertaining to my own life, that I had never known before, and also solutions to some of the problems I face as a young person today.  I have also acquired certain skills by the execution of various processes during the research progress. As mentioned earlier, I really liked the format of annotated bibliography, and would like to do more future projects on a similar format. I would have liked to add more additional sources. Nevertheless, I am quite happy about how the project has turned out to be.

Sharlene Gale S. and Graeme Codington, “Facing the Youth in the 21st Century”. May 1999.pp.1- 133. www.researchgate.net/publication/301647194

Pewresearch.org. "How Millennials Today Compare With Their Grandparents 50 Years Ago." Pew Research Center. N.p., 2018. Web. 17 July 2018.

Wu T. “The problems young people today face compared to older generations”. 23 July 2018.