Research Reflection

For this Social Research and Program Evaluation class we, the students, had to complete the process of going through I have never done research of this magnitude before this class. Before this project all the papers and research I had done didn’t seem to matter because it was all about random things and topics teachers picked and wanted the students to research on. This was the first actual study I have been a part of. In this class I was able to go through the entire process of a study and complete all the frustrating and rewarding tasks that are a part of the process.

The hardest part of the entire research process was the literary review section. I had an extremely rough beginning with the research of this study. I couldn’t quite understand how to create a research question and write an entire section on background knowledge related to the question. I had to continuously rewrite my literal review section for the paper. As the project went on the writings got easier because I was able to comprehend what I was writing about and where the information came from. It got easier as I was doing the analysis of all the questions answered on the survey.

Although there was some tough part to completing this study and paper it was extremely rewarding to go through the entire process of a study like this one. Understanding how much blood, sweat, and tears are put into making just one research paper that is hardly ever read. Having always used papers to complete other assignments or create citations for my work it made me appreciate all the researchers out there who have spent so much time writing research papers.