Our group decided to choose millennials as our research topic. After a few days of thinking and researching about millennials, I got the believe that millennials have a lot of negative stereotypes coming from other generations, such as being lazy, not being able to communicate face-to-face, or being selfish. Many of these stereotypes are related to the modern technology. Millennials, who were born between 1980 and 1999, are the first generation, which grew up around smart devices, such as cell phones, tablets and computers. Thus, my research topic for this course will be "How does the use of smart devices define the human interaction of millennials?"

Millennials are on the verge of entering the workplace, interact and cooperate with other generations. Millennials value different characteristics than generation xers, or baby boomers. It will be interesting to follow how companies react to the shared working place of millennials and generation xers. Thus, I am interested in this topic, because the way workplaces respond to millennials affects me as well, as a millennial. This project will give me a better understanding of how older generations value millennials in the workplace, how millennials balance communication through smart devices and face-to-face communication, and how millennials challenge the work-life balance. All three topics are focused on how the use of smart devices supports or hinders the communication. In addition, I think that my own experience will also benefit this project, because I grew up as a millennial and I am part of this new generation. Thus, I am qualified to write about this topic, because I understand millennials, what their interests, needs, and wants are. This is easiest when I am around this generation. Fortunately, I am an international student at the University of South Carolina and spend time around millennials every day. This enables me to study millennials, how they interact with one another and around the world. 

The first three research articles I found about my specific topic are written by Sharon A. DeVaney, Cathy Gulli, and Karen Myers. 

"Understanding The Millennial Generation" is an academic journal written by Sharon A. DeVaney. This article is from the book Journal of Financial Service Professionals, and focuses on comparing and contrasting the millennial generation Generation X, as well as the baby boomers. This article holds value to my research paper, because it has data and statistics to compare the millennials to older generations. In addition, it gives suggestions how you should communicate with millennials in the workplace. However, this article also holds some bias. DeVaney uses her own life experiences with millennials,graduate students at Purdue University, and put them into a general context. This group of people might only be an outlier and does not reflect on the entire millennial generation. 

The second article is "Stop Texting Mom!", which is an informative article written by Cathy Gulli. This article focuses on college students and the interaction with parents. Gulli states that the daily communication between college students and their parents hinders them from developing autonomy. Research studies have been used from Barbara Hofer and Abigail Sullivan Moore, authors of the book "The iConnected Parent: Staying Connected to Your College Kids (And Beyond) While Letting Them Grow Up." This article holds value, because it is a real-life example and study that shows the communication between a college student and her mother, however, it is also biased, because the article only shows one example and generalizes it to the entire millennial generation. 

"Millennials In The Workplace: A Communication Perspective On Millennials' Organizational Relationships And Performance" is an academic journal written by Karen Myers and Sadaghiani Kamyab. The article deals with positive and negative stereotypes towards millennials. The two authors discuss and explain the reasoning behind those stereotypes. In addition, they discuss millennials' communicated values and expectations and their potential effect on co workers. This article holds value in writing in-depth about communication values and expectations for millennials. However, Myers holds bias towards millennials, because she does not integrate the opposing point of view in her article.

I believe that my research question is very strong, direct, and leads my way to the research paper. I argue that the question is arguable in different ways, however, after writing a thesis, the paper will have a very strict path, which is easy to follow for the reader. In addition, I think that this question is very diverse, however, at the same time very straight forward, which makes this research question so valuable. The three sources that I briefly introduced have some agreements in common, but also many disagreements. All three sources agree on the stereotypes that millennials face, whether they are positive or negative ones. However, these sources disagree on how millennials will face the workplace challenge and how they interact with co workers. DeVaney on the one hand shows suggestions how to communicate with millennials, but also states that millennials will have a very productive environment with their co workers, whereas Myers has some doubt in the production level of millennials in the workplace. Cathy Gulli has a completely different perspective and says that millennials are not grown up enough to work on their own and to be reliable, because smart devices take away their self-reliance. These disagreements between authors make valuable points for a research paper. I chose my sources very wisely with the hope that every source can affect my research paper with different knowledge and different views. Those different perspectives certainly affect my prior knowledge and will change some of it throughout this project. A research paper is never finished, it is an ongoing process.

