Research Sources: Sigma Kappa Sorority

My topic is Sigma Kappa Sorority. I chose this topic because I am a new member and I think doing my map of them will help me learn more about them and where they go around campus and what they do. I will evaluate Sigma Kappa by going to all the places that the sorority gets together and seeing whether the things they do are beneficial to the girls in the sorority and to ASU. I will go to the classroom where we have our new member meetings, to the MU patio where our sisters frequently eat lunch together, to the apartment complex, Adelphi where a good amount of the sorority sisters live, to the chapter room where we have sisterhood nights, to a corner in Hayden and the Adelphi commons where our active sisters host study hours, and to the Claire Bridge Nursing Home where we volunteer. The Claire Bridge Nursing Home is an Alzheimer’s elderly home. Sigma Kappa volunteers there because one of our philanthropies is Alzheimer’s research. I will also by looking into how women that were in sororities in college compare to women that weren’t in older life.

            I’ll look at how older women that were in sororities are still effected positively by sororities by going to the Sigma Kappa website and looking into the alumni information. That will be one of my sources. Sigmakappa.org will be a very helpful source to inform me. I learned all about the history of my sorority. I also learned all about the philanthropies and also how the alumni can still remain involved after they leave college because the sorority really does not end once you leave college, it is lifelong sisterhood.

            The scholarly article, “Sororities, A Psychiatric Appraisal” written by Jackson A. Smith, MD., is 603 pages and in a journal called The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. This source will be helpful with my topic because it explains the effects of a sorority on girls that are the topic I want to evaluate. I learned that the more women there are in a sorority the more women not in a sorority feel the need to conform and join a sorority.

            The third source I’m using is a book called The Sorority Handbook written by Ida Shaw Martin, it is 182 pages and has sections for different types of sororities. Within those sections, it holds different details about all the different sororities. This topic interests me so much because being new to a sorority, this book was very informative and helpful in understanding reasons why different sororities have the different traditions and things that they do with their sisterhoods. I learned from this book traditions about other sororities, because being  new member in my sorority, the active members do not really tell us about the other Panhellenic sororities.