• Quindaro, Kansas and the Underground Railroad

  PART V: EVALUATING THE RESOURCES

      At this stage of your research, notes have been taken, and the  resources have been  sorted and classified.  Careful researchers like to analyze the resources  they have  and use only the best sources and those that go directly to the question being researched.  In the end, all researchers have to make the final decision as to which resources are valid and how to use them in their final write up.; as a matter of fact, part of the write up is a discussion of the sources used.

•   One way of determining the best resources is to ask questions about how valid or reliable the resource is.  The following questions are a guide to determining how valid a resource is.  Answer them for every resource being used in the research project.
•    Who wrote/said it?  When was it written/said?  Who preserved it?
•    Do the answers to the above questions make you question or accept the source?
•    Are there other sources that back up the information in this source?
•    If there are no other sources, are there any reasons why this source should be discounted or accepted?
•  If there are other sources, are they separate incidents or do they appear to be the same story told differently?

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