Research Prospectus

When I was trying to come up with a topic of research I went through many different questions I’ve always wanted to answer about my career field, criminal justice. I particularly chose to explore how birth order might affect criminal tendencies because it truly brings together two fields I very much enjoy which are psychology and criminology. For many years, I volunteered at an Orphanage in Miami, Florida called “His House”. I truly had a wonderful experience and I took so much from volunteering, but I was also curious because the personalities of the children I worked with were all so bizarre. The children at His House have many different ages, starting from as young as newborns to emerging adults. While volunteering at His House I met children from the same biological parents however their personalities were extremely different. Although there were brothers and sisters from the same mother and father, usually one seemed to portray stronger delinquency tendencies than others. In psychology, there is a condition called “middle child syndrome” which basically supports the idea that usually the middle child is the outcast and more introverted than the younger and older child. I have decided to tie in the middle child syndrome with the delinquent tendencies to create a thesis revolving around these two ideas. Perhaps, many people would be surprised to learn that birth order can have an effect on delinquent tendencies but I will demonstrate that the order in which children are born, does affect criminal activity, specifically the middle-born child’s. To support my thesis, I will need to conduct some thorough research on the middle-child syndrome so that I can clearly define it for my audience and thus strengthen my argument. I will also need to evaluate criminological theories and research some statistics that I may evaluate to see if my thesis is reasonable. I hope to find if indeed birth order can affect criminal behavior, and if so, is the middle child in the family more prone to this behavior. I came across an article titled “Birth Order and Risky Behavior” by Laura Argys from the University of Colorado, in this article Laura speaks of some empirical research that has been conducted regarding birth order and risky teen behaviors such as smoking marijuana, drinking, and crime. The article states that the results from this research provides the strongest evidence that bird order, particularly middle and last-born children are prone to these risky behaviors. Additionally, there is an online publication from the Legal and Criminological Psychological journal that refers to the characteristics of some sexual offenders, one of these is indeed birth order which according to this journal affects personality in a negative way. I can synthesize these two articles and make a unified argument open to the idea that birth order in general has an impact on criminal behavior, as proven by research. The American Psychological Association (APA) also has many publications; I found a particular one that carried a study involving criminal demographics and family history. The APA came to the conclusion that a father figure is important in the correct development of children, especially in the teenage years. The presence of a father figure in the family can be correlated with birth order, because as is very common in America, the risk of divorce is usually higher after the first child, perhaps leaving that middle child at a disadvantage with no father figure for guidance. Hopefully with much more research I will be able to create a strong argument to convince my audience that something as unpredictable and insignificant as it may seem, birth order, can indeed affect someone’s personality and success in life.

Richard Rodriguez's "The Achievement of Desire"

   As I was reading Rodriguez's piece I found myself being able to relate to many of his experiences. For one, the line "[the scholarship boy] brings books into the house,they don't take their place with other books which the family are reading" caught my attention instantly because I can think of a point in my childhood when I was that "scholarship boy". When I was younger growing up in an immigrant, Hispanic family I considered myself at a disadvantage compared to other children my age. My parents couldn't read to me, help me with my homework, or even be in the PTA because of the language barrier. Although at the time I denied it I know realized that I resented them for quite some time because of the difficulties I faced in school. On the contrary to Rodriguez's parent's, my mother and father were always educated, however, once we moved to the United States, they had to support our family, leaving no time for reading or any other educated activities. As the first from my family going to college in the United States, I'm always celebrated at family reunions or Christmas parties. I am very familiar with the comment "your parents must be very proud of you" as Rodriguez is. As I grew older, I now realize that everything my parents did has gotten me to this point in my life. Although at first I might have felt like they weren't supportive, they always tried to give me the best life possible and I thank them for that. Unlike Rodriguez, I have a very positive relationship with both my mother and my father and I look up to them because they are exactly the type of parent I hope to someday be.

My interpretation of The Pain Scale

   There are undeniably many interesting ideas in Eula Biss' "The Pain Scale", at first I didn't quite know how to approach so many different ideas and thoughts put together, and to be honest I still don't grasp exactly what she is trying to communicate to her audience. However, I did realize that like our thoughts, which are sometimes a random jumble of emotions and occurrences, perhaps this piece is just that. Perhaps, this was Biss' thought process and her method of organization was to arrange it into a scale, into "The Pain Scale."   
   There are several statements in this piece that make me question what I have always believed in, or at least "thought" to be true. For example, I find it particularly curious that she cites Anders Celsius, who introduced the scale himself, and how he had originally made zero the point at which water boils. We have always been taught that the lower the temperature the colder it gets, but how interesting would it be if reality were just the opposite? What if, zero is truly the point at which water boils and turns into nothing, as it evaporates it becomes "zeroed". This brings me to the word "zeroed", as I read over Biss' description of how a chicken upside down becomes "zeroed" I realized that although it isn't a word, I knew exactly what she meant. This is because, I believe I at one point have felt "zeroed" myself. As a baby I was burned by an exploding pressure cooker and although I was young and cannot recall much my mother always says that I never cried, I just stared at her almost as if seeing through her. When I read the word "zeroed" those events from my childhood came back almost as if to aid me in understanding Biss' purpose for including the word.
   Apart from the section on zero that left me so heavily intrigued, I was especially drawn to number five. I assume it is because this is the number I can relate to most. As Biss described "the tyranny of the mean" I chuckled because I knew just what she was referring to. As a runner, I have suffered from many injuries, from shin splints, to runner's knee, bruised knees, you name it. If there was one thing I would've wanted to avoid more than the pain of the injury it would've been trying to get my trainer too understand the intensity of the pain I was in. He would never understand me, and so when using a pain scale, I would always rate my pain five, I figured it is enough pain to need treatment but not enough to be rushed to a hospital or get an x-ray. Sometimes, I would be in excruciating pain, knowing that it was more than a five, but nonetheless I would rate it a five because in my trainer's eyes a five would allow me to run the next day's race and not to sit it out. It is interesting how everyone has their own definition of pain and hence their own scale and so trying to fully understand someone else's pain is close to impossible and I assimilate this to the saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," because each individual is quite different and what we see, feel, or experience varies so much from one person to another.

Michael Pollan Summary: Blog Post

    Pollan begins his article with the same predictable arguments many of us use to fabricate excuses for ourselves for why we advocate for change but sit back and do absolutely nothing about the way we live. At first he ironically comments on Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth’” as he points out that switching our light bulbs seemed a miniscule cure to a gigantic world issue. I found myself agreeing with this statement and then quickly overturning that thought. As Pollan argues, our passive way of fixing things will not work out satisfactorily in this urgent situation. He includes that everyone seems to think what they personally do doesn’t matter because in another part of the world their “carbon foot-print doppelganger” is rapidly replacing every last bit of CO2 that they struggle to prohibit themselves from emitting. At first his view is unclear but it quickly becomes evident that Pollan does support these small changes, because they trigger our neighbors and friends to become motivated to change their lives too, and eventually we will influence others to carry on our “green” habits. However, Pollan states that rather than taking initiative, we feed ourselves the lie that we must depend on technology to come up with smarter ways to conserve and believe that “ethanol and nuclear power–new liquids and electrons to power the same old cars and houses and lives.” We come to have faith in our own “cheap-energy mind” and as we do so, we ask “why bother?” hence the intriguing name of Pollan’s article. Pollan is assertive when he says we should bother, because living in the dark is what has gotten us up to this point. He is an advocate for planting a garden of our own, because it is just the start of a self-subsisting and rewarding life. He reasons that by planting this garden we begin to “heal the split about what you think and what you do” and that not only will it benefit the environment but it will strengthen relationships with friends and neighbors as we borrow “tools” from them.  Pollan ends with the thought that our “relationship” with the planet need not for the sole benefit of one and not another, because as long as we are capable of planting, and the sun still exists, there is always a better way to do things for ourselves without harming and “diminishing the world we live in” a truly symbiotic relationship with our surroundings.


Work Cited


Pollan, Michael. "Why Bother?" New York TImes Magazine 20 Apr. 2008:
19+. Rpt. in The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing. John D.
Ramage, John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 6th ed. New York:
Pearson, 2012. 88-94. Print.

Research Idea Blog Post 1

As I was discussing some interesting ideas with my roommates I stumbled upon some topics that would be cool to research. I drafted quite a long list and then came up with the top four best entries. For now I just have these ideas in mind and I am looking into which one of them I could come up with the most support for as well as which one I can find extensive research on. Since I plan on double majoring in criminology and psychology I wanted to incorporate both fields into my research paper.

The topics I came up with are still very vague and need some work but are somewhat along the lines of this:
-how might birth order (for example: first-born, middle, late children) affect criminal tendencies?
-do "attached" children (psychology) tend to be deterred from criminal activity more than isolated children?
-Is it criminal for a child to revolt violently against their caregiver if that person abuses of them?
-Does the portrayal of crime and violence in the movies and on TV motivate younger generations to strive to behave in similar ways?