The simple word “divorce” comes with a very negative stigma, yet it has become a very common occurrence in our society. Although divorce in the United States is one of the most popular societal problems, the quality of information available to the public about divorce rates and divorce effects varies depending on what source is consulted. To display this point, I first describe and rationalize my plan to evaluate a psychological point of view in an online article, a newspaper article, and a small research/educational article and defend the range and quality of the sources collected. Following, I evaluate these three sources on divorce based on their credibility, objectivity, and relevance. I conclude that the psychological based online article was more credible and objective than the newspaper article and research/educational article.
All three sources are extremely credible and of professional quality. The first source, is an article written on the American Psychological Association website. In this source they discuss necessary statistics and many links to further a readers research depending on what they are searching for. In the second source, I evaluate an extremely credible but opinionated article from the Los Angeles Times. To finish off the sources, I lastly use an educational piece from The Heritage Foundation’s online website. The Heritage Foundation is a credible educational and research institution with the hopes of promoting public policies based on traditional American values. These three sources were chosen to show the difference between professional and research articles in comparison to an article written with bias and personal opinion, and how what type of information they offer.
In the first source through the American Psychological Association website, it did excellent job on not only evaluating the conflict of divorce in the United States, but also giving the reader links to any other reason they may be visiting the site. This site begins giving the reader statistics on this common societal struggle to educate the reader on how common divorce is. What makes this site stand out is the amount of coverage of information it gives. Links are given to guide the reader to research articles towards bettering a marriage, making stepfamilies work, links to where to get help, recent news articles on the topic, and even books. It references in Encyclopedia of Psychology and the American Psychological Association alone gives the article it’s credibility.
Secondly, I chose to the Los Angeles Times article called “Divorce Trip Can Be The First Journey Towards A New Attitude”. This article sticks out because it actually shows the benefits to a divorce, which was unlike any other article I had found. Divorce is normally seen as a “society problem” or overtaken by a negative stigma, that it was shocking to see such a positive outlook on the topic. This article showed a lot of opinion and not as much information to give the reader insight on to why exactly it is seen as a problem in today’s
