This session is designed to support your Critical Reflection assignment (due on March 31, 2025).  Dr. Cullen will provide you with details and breakdown of the assignment, but to sum, you will have to 

• Apply a theoretical perspective to a current social issue relating to youth crime and youth justice
• Choose a criminological theory or perspective discussed in class
• Choose a contemporary social issue that relates to youth crime or youth justice
• Draw from a minimum of 3 academic sources and 1 non academic news source
• Use APA citation style 
• Length should be approx 5 pages not including bibliography and title page

Question for you: What does "academic" mean to you? 

Take 3-5 minutes and sort these sources into the column that you think it would best fit (academic/scholarly or not academic). 

Source Sorting Activity (click on link).  You must be logged into some sort of gmail account (MRU or personal) to move the sticky notes. 

Question for you: What would you like me to talk about during this library session? 

Why using good sources matter...

When you endeavor to find sources related to a topic of interest for your academic writing, you are demonstrating a number of skills

• You are able to synthesize a variety of information and integrate it into your own work
• You are able to investigate the dialogue that has occurred related to an area of interest and engage in that conversation through your academic writing
• Using good, credible reliable sources will elevate the accuracy and authority of your own work

Authority is Constructed and Contextual

Information, in any format, is produced to convey a message and is shared via a selected delivery method.  The iterative processes of researching, creating, revising, and disseminating information vary, and the resulting produce reflects these differences (ACRL par. 13).

• Information creations are valued differently depending on the context and purpose for which they are created
• Audience matters. Certain things are created for specific purposes and don't make one format of information better. It is up to us to discern what information process best fits our information needs.
• In your own creation process, understand that your choices in what type of information you use, impact the purpose for which the information product you create will be used and the message it conveys.

A scholarly publication contains articles written by experts in a particular field. The primary audience of these articles is other experts. ... Academics use a variety of terms and language to describe this: "peer-reviewed", vetted academic, or "refereed". They all mean essentially the same thing and refer to the editorial and publication process in which scholars in the same field review the research and findings before the article is published, checking for validity, originality, and quality. 

1. What are the author’s credentials? Is it written by an expert?
2. Published in a journal (is there a DOI?) If you are not sure if it is a journal article enter the title of the publication into Ulrichs Web
3. Academic language
4. Includes reference list
5. Length
6. A "Received" and "Accepted" date
7. Is it an actual article? Sometimes other types of content are included in scholarly publications, such as editorials/opinion pieces and book reviews.  Make sure you are looking at an article. 

Examples

Cullen, G., Cristiano, N., Walters, D., Hathaway, A., Wrathall, M., & Wadsworth, E. (2024). The Relationship Between Rates of Cannabis Use and Covid-19 Infection Rates During the Pandemic: An Analysis of Canada’s National Cannabis Survey. Substance Use & Misuse, 59(14), 2094-2102.

Cullen, G. J. (2023). Examining the risk and predictive factors for substance use and mental health among Indigenous youth in out-of-home care. Children and Youth Services Review, 150, 106971.

Be aware of biases! Where do you normally get your news? 

Recommended places to start searching for your news:

Canadian Newstream Collection

Google News

Site searches - site:cbc.ca; site: nationalpost.ca

List of Topics provided (you can also pick your own topic/issue)

- The social construction of youth adolescence/deviancy
- Moral panic and deviancy amplification
- Rates of youth crime and how to measure it (self reports, ethnography, etc.)
- Youth law legislation in Canada
- Overrepresentation of Indigenous youth in the criminal justice system
- Racial profiling
- Immigration and youth crime
- Unfair punishment of minority youth in schools (zero-tolerance policies).
- Cyberbullying
- Causes of youth homelessness.
- Mental health and addictions
- Social control of the homeless

Examples of Theories Discussed in Class

-Strain Theory
-General Strain Theory
-Social Disorder Theory
-Labelling Theory
-Moral Panic Theory
-Social Control Theory
-Critical Race Theory
-Feminist Theory
-Conflict Theory
 

A note about Generative AI

Generative AI is getting a lot of hype - it has been around for a while but is accelerating at a rapid speed.  These tools offer a variety of functions including generating text from a prompt,  providing summaries of information, fixing and generating code, creating an image from a prompt, and translating text. 

If you are interested in trying it out, it is recommended that you treat it as a supplementary tool rather than your primary approach to research and writing.  Apply the same critical evaluation tools to AI as you would any source.  

• Verify the authenticity of the source by running a Google or Google Scholar search with the title in quotations.
• If it is a journal article, you can check to see if it is published in the journal it says it is in. 
• If it cites a particular author, search the author's publications

Many AI tools fabricate results.  These are also referred to as "hallucinations" (confabulations, delusions...botshit!)  

Generative AI tools also carry the potential for inaccurate and misleading outputs. Content generated by these AI tools has been found to provide users with fabricated data that appears authentic. These inaccuracies are so common that they are referred to as  “hallucinations” (MIT). Be aware that AI makes stuff up!  Here is an example of what I mean:

These answers are a bit problematic...why? 

"Digital Activism: The Role of Social Media in the Black Lives Matter Movement".  

-attempted to run a title search in Google and Google Scholar and it seems like a fake article.  J. Smith is such a generic name that it is hard to discern any additional information about the author. 

"From Hashtags to Street Protests: Examining the Evolution of Digital Activism in the Black Lives Matter Movement"

-Could not find an author or an actual article connected to this title.  It looks like this source is the most similar. 

"Black Lives Matter and the Power of Social Media Activism"

-Running a Google Scholar search, there are other authors with the same last name who have published in the area of activism and social media, but the article itself does not exist

"Tweeting for Justice: An Analysis of Twitter's Role in the Black Lives Matter Movement"

-Again, this article does not exist. 

Tips to Reduce Fabricated Results and to ETHICALLY leverage AI Tools

1.  Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)  - One of the most promising techniques to reduce hallucinations is called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG. In a RAG model, LLMs are given a set of trusted documents, such as peer-reviewed research papers, that they can draw information from.
2. Summarizing Existing Text  - Hallucination rates are lowest when chatbots are summarizing text. Giving the chatbot a specific text to work with is similar to the strategies that RAG use, but at a smaller scale.
3. Don't ask the Chatbot for citations  - Even when real and on topic, citations given are not guaranteed to be the real source the information you are interested in came from. Also, it is possible for the text of a citation to be part of an AI's training data, but not the actual full-text (especially if the full-text is behind a paywall) — this would mean that the chatbot can regurgitate the citation in full with no knowledge of what is actually in the cited text.

Tools to Use

• OpenAI's ChatGPT (requires a free account to use ChatGPT 4o a limited number of times and ChatGPT 4o mini, their free chatbot)

• Google AI's Gemini (formerly known as Bard, but was renamed Gemini) (requires a non-MRU Google account to use Gemini chatbot)

• Perplexity AI's Perplexity AI (doesn't require an account, but a free account is required to try Perplexity AI Pro and to save chats/threads)

• Anthropic's Claude (requires a free account)

• Microsoft's Copilot/Bing search (doesn't require an account, but supposedly works best with Microsoft account and in the Microsoft Edge browser)

• HuggingFace's HuggingChat (doesn't require an account to use the chatbot)

Keep in mind:

• These models work by performing a calculation to predict what the next most likely word in a sequence is.

• These models are not search engines. Some of them have search engine functionality now (like ChatGPT) and some will even provide footnotes (like Copilot/Bing), but it is still worth examining the linked source to see how the chatbot has represented the source as the bot normally provides its own summary of the text.  This is different than Google Search snippets where an excerpt from the actual source is provided to the user.

Things to consider

• ChatGPT is designed to provide "plausible" responses, not credible responses. You will need to apply your critical evaluation skills to any results generated.
• ChatGPT was not trained on paywalled content, which means the content the libraries subscribes to is often not reflected in ChatGPTs responses.
• ChatGPT makes up/fabricates plausible sounding citations to sources that don't actually exist. 
• ChatGPT was trained on information prior to 2021, so you will not get the most recent research relating to your topic

Some people don't use ChatGPT because of ethical considerations. Here are a few of those concerns.

• Privacy: It collects and shares a lot of data about you it draws from your account information, your IP address and your activity using it. It does allow you to opt out of having your transcripts saved.
• Copyright: ChatGPT was trained on information on the internet, including copyrighted information, with no permission from or payment to the creators. There are a lot of court cases about this as of Fall 2023.
• Unpaid Labor: .It uses the prompts you enter to continue to train its models. This means it is using your work to train its subscription model as well, so many consider this unpaid labor.
• Exploitative Labor Practices: Investigative journalists discoved that workers in Kenya, Uganda and India were paid $1-$2 per hour to review data for disturbing, graphic and violent images that were psychologically scarring.
• Bias: The majority of information on the internet is in English and presents a western perspective, which means ChatGPT is learning from a biased data set. These biases are present in ChatGPTs output.

For the following exercise, join the group that matches your birthday and complete the exercise.

Group 1 (your birthday is in January, February, March)

Scan the following resource (you don't need to read it in full)

Consider the following:

• Does this source undergo any review or quality control? Is this a good news article to use for this assignment?
• What is the major youth crime issue discussed in this article?
• What type of evidence do this news article use to support their argument? Data, other people's research, personal opinions, etc.? Did it link you to any type of academic sources?
• What crime or social theory could relate to this article?
• Can you find a scholarly article related to this source?

Group 2 (your birthday is in April, May, June

Scan the following resource (you don't need to read it in full)

Consider the following:

• Does this source undergo any review or quality control? Is this a good news article to use for this assignment?
• What is the major youth crime issue discussed in this article?
• What type of evidence does this news article use to support their argument? Data, other people's research, personal opinions, etc.?
• What crime or social theory could relate to this article?
• Can you find a scholarly article related to this source?

Group 3 (your birthday is in July, August, September)

Scan the following resource (you don't need to read it in full)

Consider the following:

• Does this source undergo any review or quality control? Is this a good news article to use for this assignment?
• What is the major youth crime issue discussed in this article?
• What type of evidence does this news article use to support their argument? Data, other people's research, personal opinions, etc.?
• What crime or social theory could relate to this article?
• Can you find a scholarly article related to this source?

Group 4 (your birthday is October, November, or December)

Scan the following resource (you don't need to read it in full)

Consider the following:

• Does this source undergo any review or quality control? Is this a good news article to use for this assignment?
• What is the major youth crime issue discussed in this article?
• What type of evidence does this news article use to support their argument? Data, other people's research, personal opinions, etc.?
• What crime or social theory could relate to this article?
• Can you connect this article to a  news article?

But seriously...

Your scholarly sources will likely be one of the following:

• An peer-reviewed journal article
• An academic book or edited book chapter (published by an academic press, written by a scholar(s))

Remember: 

Use your critical evaluation skills to determine whether your other sources are good enough to use in this assignment! Look for references to data, evidence, and links to other scholarship.  Make sure that the source you use comes from a reliable source.

Figure 2. Copely, R. Huge stand in the market with a large selection of fruits [Photograph]. Pixy.org. https://pixy.org/143529/

What words would you use to describe this image? 

Questions to consider

• Are you using the terminology that an expert in the field would use?
• Is there more than one way to spell the word?
• Are there any synonyms or other terms that could apply to your topic?
• Are there sub-topics that can help you specify or narrow down your topic? 
• Consider writing out your topic in a sentence and then highlighting the different concepts within. 

Things to remember when using Library Search:

1. Sign in to save searches, items, and to request materials.

2. Use the pin icon to save books and articles. 

3. Use the filters on the right. You will use Availability, Resource Type, and Date filters most often.

4. Some items won't be available. You can request unavailable items using interlibrary loan.

5. When viewing an item record, scroll down to the Get It or Full Text section to get the item.

Search Smarter!

You can search in a way to combine or omit different terms by telling the search engine exactly what you want…this can help you save some time (and frustration!)

• Use quotation marks to keep phrases together - "strain theory"

• Use  AND to combine search terms - "strain theory" AND "racial profiling"

• Use OR to connect two or more similar terms - "strain theories" OR "anomie theories"

• Use wild cards to substitute a letter or suffix with a symbol - societ*  (society, societies, societal etc.)

Search Google Scholar

Google Scholar is another great way to find peer-reviewed/scholarly material. Google Scholar has a nifty citation chaining function.  The Cited by function will forward you to indexed scholarly material that has cited an article that you may be interested in.  The Related Articles link will direct you to similar articles that may have the same metadata or keywords. 

The Advanced Search is found by clicking the menu icon (top left).
Besides providing links to articles in MRU databases, Google Scholar links to online repositories that contain articles the author has been allowed to upload.  Academia.edu and ResearchGate are among the repositories searched by Google Scholar.

By clicking on the Settings icon, you can select library links to show library access for up to 5 libraries (type in Mount Royal and click on save).  If you are logged into the MRU library, links should automatically populate if you are running a Google search in another window. 

Note: Google uses different commands: ~; -; +; but AND/OR also works

If you are searching Google (not Google Scholar), you can also limit your search to show specific websites. Eg:

• site:un.org (United Nations)
• site:gc.ca (Government of Canada)
• site:en.unesco.org (UNESCO)
• site:worldbank.org (World Bank)
• site:wto.org (World Trade Organization

CanLII (The Canadian Legal Information Institute) is a freely available database powered and supported by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada.  Content focuses on Canadian primary law sources that include: 

• Jurisprudence (Federal and Provincial case law, tribunal decisions).
• Legislation (Federal and Provincial statutes and regulations)
• Commentary (both refereed and crowd-generated commentary).

The following page might provide you with citing sources.  Remember: We use APA in CRJS with the exception of instances of primary legal resources, where we then refer to the Citing Legal Resources guide (applying COAL/McGill citation style).

• Cite Sources: Learn the correct way to cite sources by using these guides, tutorials, and videos.
• Referencing Webinars: APA & MLA. Referencing Webinars are 75 minutes long.  Registration is required.
• Online Appointments: Personalized online 30-minute appointments with a Learning Strategist

Take an MLA or APA Referencing Tutorial on D2L!

These self-paced 90-minute tutorials covers the same content as live workshops—why citation is important along with the basics of in-text citations and reference entries. Students who complete the tutorial will gain access to a form they can fill out and submit as proof of completion.

Access the tutorial on D2L: Using Google Chrome as your web browser, log in to D2L (learn.mru.ca) with your @mtroyal.ca account. Click the “Discover” tab, then type “APA”  or "MLA" in the search bar. Click on the “APA Referencing Tutorial”  or "MLA Referencing Tutorial" link and then the “Enroll in Course” button. If you have any questions about the tutorial, contact sls@mtroyal.ca.

You can access your weekly comment card here. 

Download a copy for yourself and answer the questions - I am here if you need some help!

Once you are done, upload to D2L.