Evaluation of Research Project

My research project was relatively successful in that the final presented piece was informative, cogent and coherent for audience members and even encouraged discussion. I approached the researching process by gaining a greater understanding of key concepts within my hypothesis, such as “The American Dream” and “dystopian youth”. Understanding this more clearly myself, I was able to analyze my key study films with acute awareness as to what I was looking for. In my research methodology I used secondary sources such as the internet, books and magazines and also primary sources in which I carried out a structured, open questioned, group interview. The internet was beneficial in that it allowed reference to previous critical articles, which gave some valuable quotes to build up my argument. However, internet resources could also be useless as there were many subjective essays which did not place much emphasis on knowledge and argument which I felt would not strengthen my research. Though, subjective opinions were never the less useful in my primary research, where I felt it necessary to use interpretive data to gain valid opinions from young English cinema goers. Here, I tried to gain a fairer picture by posting the structured interview questions on “rotten tomato” and “Imdb”,to get a response from young Americans living the supposed dream yet this was deemed a fruitless task as I received no replies. Therefore, my primary supporting research relied heavily on perhaps un-representative data.

In selecting material for my presentation script I first planned an essay like structure to my argument created by the research I had undertaken, and then proceeded in using the relevant evidence to enhance these points. Any points that I then felt did not aid my argument, or were not relevant I then discarded. However, because I was strict in finding relevant material in the first instance I found that I did not need to discard very much material. Overall, I found that my project was very relevant to the context of the recent American presidential elections, and this formed a double layer to my project, as I honed in on the idea that becoming president is the epitome of succeeding the American dream. I therefore, concluded that the stance of the American dream E.G. whether it was alive and well or if it was decaying, was directly or indirectly linked with dystopian youth which is ultimately, a generation of disillusionment as depicted by my focus films. This point was highlighted by Barack Obama in a recent speech that “The American Dream needs to be reclaimed” and then perhaps American society can re-exist in harmony, though that is assuming that America has resided in harmony before.