Why Did I Choose This Topic, and What Was My Research Process Like?
As a woman, I naturally feel very strongly about women's rights and pay closer attention to issues of that matter than others. I had a general idea of the awful conditions that Saudi women live in prior to this project, and what little I knew about the situation angered me. One day a news alert from CNN popped up on my phone announcing that Saudi Arabia had passed a new decree allowing women to drive. As a firm believer in women's rights and hater of women's oppression, the news pleasantly surprised me and stayed in the back of my mind. I thought about it from time to time until I was asked to do a research project on a modern-day issue, at which point I decided at once that this would be the topic I'd choose. The injustices women face at the hands of men have and will always spark a passionate interest in me, and I thought that writing a paper on something I truly cared about would make for a much better paper. Through my writing I hoped to spread awareness of the atrocities of the patriarchy, while at the same time praising Saudi Arabia for finally taking action against it.
I started my researching using search engines that the school recommended, such as PowerSearch and Gale. I was originally only looking for obvious legislative expansions of women's rights that occurred after the driving decree in order to support my thesis that the driving decree was a catalyst for further expansion of equality in Saudi Arabia. But as I sifted through several articles, I began to realize the situation was much more complicated than that. While there were a few new pieces of legislation that provided women with more rights, the a large portion of the push for equality was occurring in social, religious, and economic settings, not just political. I immediately expanded my search and using Google instead of the school's search engines. I searched for new government policies, changes in Islam, first hand accounts from women living in Saudi Arabia, and anything else that would help me understand how Saudi Arabian society was changing. By typing generic searches into google such as "Saudi driving decree" and "Saudi women's rights" I was able to find several informative sites which taught me about the face behind the changes, Prince Bin Salman, and what some of the most unexpected changes were.
The most difficult part of my research was finding information that directly related to my thesis. There were no clear-cut statements about the influence of the driving decree on women's rights, so I had to dig through several small changes in freedoms and connect the dots between each of them until they formed a clear, arguable pattern. Another thing that frustrated me during the research process was that even after I thought I was done, I had to keep coming back to research very specific topics as I realized while writing my essay that didn't have all the evidence I needed. Even so, I believe that final result, my research paper, was able to accurately describe every aspect of how Saudi Arabia is slowly modernizing and equalizing by finding continuities in data between sources and picking out the most important pieces of evidence.
I started my researching using search engines that the school recommended, such as PowerSearch and Gale. I was originally only looking for obvious legislative expansions of women's rights that occurred after the driving decree in order to support my thesis that the driving decree was a catalyst for further expansion of equality in Saudi Arabia. But as I sifted through several articles, I began to realize the situation was much more complicated than that. While there were a few new pieces of legislation that provided women with more rights, the a large portion of the push for equality was occurring in social, religious, and economic settings, not just political. I immediately expanded my search and using Google instead of the school's search engines. I searched for new government policies, changes in Islam, first hand accounts from women living in Saudi Arabia, and anything else that would help me understand how Saudi Arabian society was changing. By typing generic searches into google such as "Saudi driving decree" and "Saudi women's rights" I was able to find several informative sites which taught me about the face behind the changes, Prince Bin Salman, and what some of the most unexpected changes were.
The most difficult part of my research was finding information that directly related to my thesis. There were no clear-cut statements about the influence of the driving decree on women's rights, so I had to dig through several small changes in freedoms and connect the dots between each of them until they formed a clear, arguable pattern. Another thing that frustrated me during the research process was that even after I thought I was done, I had to keep coming back to research very specific topics as I realized while writing my essay that didn't have all the evidence I needed. Even so, I believe that final result, my research paper, was able to accurately describe every aspect of how Saudi Arabia is slowly modernizing and equalizing by finding continuities in data between sources and picking out the most important pieces of evidence.
Header borrowed from "Soqualmal"
https://www.souqalmal.com/financial-education/ae-en/4-tips-for-buying-your-childs-first-car/
https://www.souqalmal.com/financial-education/ae-en/4-tips-for-buying-your-childs-first-car/