For my position paper I decided to pick a topic that I have not previously written about: vaccinations. Being a vaccination supporter, I considered it to be "right up my alley"; however, this was before I had read the instructions to the assignment properly.
The paper is not on "should we or should we not vaccinate our children", but on whether or not we should keep the current vaccination schedule or change the rates and times of these vaccinations.
So, after mind mapping some ideas I realised I had no idea on the 21st century vaccination process in New Zealand. First stop was the Ministry of Health website for the current vaccination schedule. This gave me some very pretty coloured pamphlets to download. Next I set off to the Massey library database to find some real, nitty gritty, scholastic information. I started by typing "vaccine AND schedule AND Zealand"; to my surprise this did yield some good results with quite a few peer reviewed articles about the vaccination schedule/rates in New Zealand. However, I did have a problem finding opposing positions to the topic. So I tried a search in the database for anti-vaccine which did not return great results.
I set about getting the opinion of some anti-vaccine
lobbyists to help me in my search for opposition
papers.
This was a turn in the wrong direction and an hour of my life I will never get back.
I then had a thought to look on the World Health Organisation website for inspiration and realized that their recommendations and reasoning were different to the proposed changes made by the New Zealand authors. This has given me a more balanced view for my position paper.
The mistake I made while researching this topic was that I was looking for some big opposition paper saying "You should definitely not do this", when really I should have just looked at what are the vaccination recommendations by world standards, and why ours should or shouldn't change.
I think we both initially thought the vaccination topic would be easier than we thought, however I also found it a struggle to find anti-vaccination resources but a little persistence began to pay off. I agree with what you said about looking for "some big opposition paper". Its something you expect to be able to find somewhere but in reality you have to really hunt down smaller parts of the topic and piece them together.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both you and Nicole, sometimes you have to take a step back and look at your question from a different angle.
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