Part 1- Introduction

Determining my topic

During the summer before my senior year, I spent hours working on a topic surrounding the comparison between print newspapers and online newspapers and how the change has impacted society. I immersed myself in this topic because I believed it was something I was passionate about, and I thought it could help me later in life. However, on the first day of school, I began to realize that this topic wasn’t truly what I wanted to study—it was what I thought would make others happy. This realization made me understand that I needed to focus on something I was genuinely passionate about, rather than what others believed was the "right" idea. This led me to focus on my real passion: reading. This opened a new road in my mind and made me excited about the idea that I could pursue whatever I wanted. The first thing that came to mind regarding novels was the *Throne of Glass* series. This series had introduced me to reading and the wonders of story-building, characters, adventures, and the impact novels could have on young readers. Although I had selected the series I wanted to focus on, I still didn’t know how I would connect it to a research topic. I then began thinking about the different representations of leadership in the novels and how the characters led their people in various ways. This diverse representation, combined with my love for the series, helped me develop my research project. I eventually narrowed down my topic and formulated the research question: When analyzing the Throne of Glass series, which leadership style provided the most efficient and successful outcomes in relation to the characters and their motives, and how does this result connect to real-life leadership theories and their efficiency?

Mom to the rescue

Now, figuring out what I was going to do was great and all, but then came the harder part: figuring out how to actually do it. I spent countless hours aimlessly searching the internet, JSTOR, and EBSCO, wondering how I was going to connect a book to leadership styles. That’s when I did what any reasonable person would do when they don’t know what to do—I asked my mom. She guided me to start small by researching individual leadership styles that might have been presented in the books.

Hours and Hours

This lead me to gathering measuring methods, background infromation, and previous studies done on different leadership styles over hours and hours of work. I ended with 6 different leadership styles preparing to add more as I began my methodology.

Transformational
Charismatic
Authortian
Transactional
Servant
Inspirational

How to put this all together- Methodolgy

Now that I determined which leadership styles I was gonna focus on I had to figue out how to measire them throughout the novels. I first look at previous research but could not find a study that had been done looking at measuring leadership styles in novels. This resulted in me having to come up with my own methodology and combining other researchers measuring. I determied that under each leadership style there are different attircutions for each. This lead me to start creating a list of each and determining thats how I would measure them, based on their attributions. Although there were many other factors so I decided to make a spreadsheet for each novel so I could have all the infromation in one place.

My Goal

My hope for my research is to be able to provide a leeway for other researchers to understand the strength young adult fiction novels have on younger people. These novels had a great impact on me and I was inpired by the power and leadership capabilities of the characters and I hope that me providing a methodology for people to measure it in novels lead to more research being done.

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