I come here in hopes of help. Perhaps I am running aground with the internet, but I am having trouble finding the literature that I need for a paper that I am writing for my sociology class. I am also looking for opinions or personal experience as well.
The topic of my paper is, “Why do criminals choose crime over a career? And why do people that have career choose that over crime?” I am looking for personal accounts as well as to why you may have broken the law or if you thought about it, what made decide against it.
I need 5 book sources (that I am having trouble finding), but I also wanted to added in personal accounts as well.
Do you think you guys could help me? Tell me your personal experiences and your own opinion as to why you did or didn’t commit a crime.
For the book side of things, have you tried Google Books? Google went to a few dozen academic libraries and digitized their entire collections. Sometimes a general Internet user will be lucky enough to see a good chunk of the book, enough of it to cite from. Of course, they won’t give you the entire book unless it is out of copyright, because the publisher wants you to buy it.
Put your topic in the left box, click search
Limit down to ‘Preview Available’ on the left side
Look at the results, pick one you think seems interesting. Be weary of results which only give you the first 10 or 20 pages of the book, or don’t give you enough of the book for you to feel comfortable citing from it.
You could also try Worldcat, which is the largest library catalog (not all libraries can afford to participate, though). But if you want a certain book and it happens to be available at a library 10 miles away… might work for you to go down there and look at it on site.
For articles, you might also try Google Scholar, which will occasionally let you have access to the full-text of the article – the article citation is on the left, while the full text link (IF available) would be on the right side.
I do also highly recommend asking your academic librarian for help if you have not! We tend to know some tricks about finding articles.
I’m assuming the OP is in college. They should be able to find books on a topic being taught in the school’s library. The professor may even be the author of some of the books that come up.
Though I don’t live on campus and the paper is due on Tuesday. I waited until the last minute and I completely take blame for that. I decided that I could handle school full time and work full time.
I didn’t realize at the time just how much work that is and how little time there is in a day.
Shadez, Great idea of Googlebooks. I was trying to go the free route and save as much money as possible, but in order to get this done on time, it isn’t going to be possible. Though through that search, I found a great book that I bought. So hopefully that will help out too.
I’m still looking for personal experiences though. As much as using doctors and clinical authors in there, I would like to use some human thought process as well. If you don’t feel like sharing it on the thread but would like to help, shoot me a PM. I don’t and won’t use names.. just the actual thought of why you did or didn’t choose crime.
