Exercise 2.2 The Curious Researcher

For the next exercise in the book, we have to choose one of the 3 steps and further our research. I decided to do step 1, which is searching my topic using different keywords in a general search engine like Google or Bing. I chose Google and tried the terms 'juvenile behavior' and 'juvenile execution.' I came across a few webpages filled with the history of child executions. I tried to do further research on them, but the cases are so old, there's no record of what exactly they did. Basically, I could not find any alibis for any of the cases. Not even the most recent one, which was in 1947. Or at least the most recent on that page. For those of you who do not know, I am researching child executions and the psychology behind it to bring them to that point. I know it sounds morbid and a very depressing topic to research, but I am more interested in their behavior and why they did what they did to bring them to death row. Unfortunately, that is turning out to be a lot harder than I was hoping. Because there is no alibi from any of the juveniles, there's really no record of them besides their death row sentence. I may have to change my topic a bit since this is proving to be almost not worth it. I am not giving up just yet, but I may have to tweak it a bit, seeing as this may be near impossible with no records and my not being a professional psychologist so I cannot exactly diagnose them. I have taken a few psych courses, but that does not make me a professional nor give me the right to diagnose whatever to whomever. For now, I am going to see what I can come up with, but until then, I am going to have to start tweaking.