My Topic: The subject related to death I would like to write about is widowers (men) coping with grief. The topic can also compare how widows cope with grief as well. I’m interested in this subject because I never hear much on how the male copes with the death of his spouse. Most articles you read are strictly pertaining to the women and I would like to hear from the men.

The assignment has to be typed, I will provided the questions that need to be answered below.

My School is Community College of Philadelphia so you will have to go online and look threw their library database for articles related to the topic. If there are none, that’s fine because I don’t think there are anyways so you can find articled from the internet, but please check the school database first, thank you.

English 102

Narrowing a Topic and Incorporating Preliminary Source Materials Assignment

1. What topic do you intend to discuss in your research paper?

2. What do you intend to ARGUE for or against in relation to your topic? For instance, if I were to decide I wanted to write about families living in multigenerational homes (three or more generations living under the same roof), I might want to argue that people should think twice before doing so, or that it’s a great choice for modern families. There should be two sides to your topic – a “pro” and a “con.” If there’s only one side to your topic, it’s probably not a good choice for a research paper.

3. Why do you want to write about this topic? Take a few sentences to explain. As an example, I could say that I have lived in multigenerational homes for most of my life. As a child, I shared a house with my parents, sister, and grandparents. As a newlywed, after my husband lost his job, I moved from a single-family home to a duplex shared with my parents and my elderly grandmother. Even after my husband and I recovered enough financially to purchase our own house, my parents joined us every summer. Now, after my divorce and my father’s death, I share a home with my mother and my children. I know, through years of experience, that multigenerational living can be difficult, frustrating, and often agonizingly hard work, but I also understand and appreciate its benefits and joys.

4. What do you know about this topic? Again, take a few sentences to explain. I might say I know that multigenerational or extended-family living arrangements have been the norm for thousands of years in numerous cultures around the world. Americans in the last century have tended to prefer the nuclear family living arrangement, in which one couple shares a home with only their children, but this is changing. The recent economic downturn has pushed many families to decide they must share living space with other relatives such as grandparents, grandchildren, step-children, aunts, uncles, and cousins of every stripe. I also know that multigenerational homes are not always peaceful enclaves of diplomacy and trust. They can be loud, lacking in privacy, disruptive to their occupants, and even violent.

5. List three issues that are related to your topic. I might choose the three biggest problems I have faced in living in multigenerational homes: a lack of privacy, fights over money, and an unclear sense of who’s in charge. But I could also list the three biggest benefits I have experienced while living in multigenerational homes: close ties between family members; economic benefits from sharing living space, food, and services; and built-in babysitters! Or I could list a few from each category.

6. Using ONLY THE LIBRARY DATABASES, find three preliminary sources that discuss one or more of these issues. These sources can be magazine articles, academic journal articles, or newspaper articles, as long as the articles are at least three pages long and date from no earlier than 2003. Begin with EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete and type two or three search words into the boxes at the top. I had to search “Intergenerational Living” and “Extended Families” to find the following three sources. You will want to save the articles to your email or to a flash drive for future reference. Be sure to put your sources in the correct MLA form, as though you are including them on a works cited page. Here are mine; I haven’t double spaced them, although you will want to do so:

Durham, Michael. “The Nutcracker Generation.” New Statesman 133.4670 (2004): 26-28.

Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

Klocker, Natascha, Chris Gibson, and Erin Borger. “Living Together But Apart: Material

Geographies Of Everyday Sustainability In Extended Family Households.” Environment

& Planning A 44.9 (2012): 2240-2259. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Dec.

2013.

Lankford, Kimberly. “Caught In The Middle.” Kiplinger’s Personal Finance 65.11 (2011): 71-

75. Academic Search Complete. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.

7. Finally, find three quotations, one from each source, that talk about one or more of the issues you mentioned earlier. Introduce the quotations by telling me the authors’ names and the authors’ credentials, quote the material word for word from the source (punctuating exactly), and cite the page or paragraph number the quotation appeared in at the end, using parentheses. Remember, if you can see the page numbers on the article in the database, you will use page numbers; if you cannot see page numbers on the article, you will use paragraph numbers. Here are my three quotations:

Michael Durham, writer for New Statesman magazine, describes a typical multigenerational parent’s situation by saying, “You are caught in the middle, squeezed from both ends – dependent children under ten, but your own parents elderly and needy, both physically and emotionally. You are trying to spread yourself between the clamour of the rising generation and the guilt conferred by near relatives in old age, while still keeping a career and a home going … You are one of the seven million people who belong to the ‘nutcracker generation’” (26).

Natascha Klocker, Chris Gibson, and Erin Borger of the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research at the University of Wollongong note, in their academic journal article, that “In the Industrialized West, ageing populations and cultural diversity – combined with rising property prices and extensive years spent in education – have been recognized as diverse factors driving increases in extended family living … But cultural values of privacy, space, and independence – and the sanctity of the nuclear family – have led to duplication (and even multiplication) of household spaces, appliances, and resources, under one roof” (2240-41).

Kimberly Lankford, who writes for the magazine Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, suggests, “If your kids can no longer afford to pay their rent (and you can’t either), discuss ground rules for moving back home, including how long they can stay and how they can contribute to the household in terms of rent and chores. Some parents let their kids stay at home for a given number of months, then charge rent after that, setting aside the money to build up an emergency fund or savings the kids can use for rent or other expenses when they do move out” (75).