Being involved with academic research particularly with this project has helped me understand the structure and coding required to provide credible data. In the past, I had no idea how to code qualitative and quantitative data. Doing this academic researched helped me to distinguish the themes within the data through a survey and how to be able to use the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences to form graphs. Working on my research it was important for me to use past studies that have been conducted to help me understand the true meaning of “parent involvement” and how “improvement” should be measured throughout a survey given to parents.
The process of for evaluating and selecting sources for my research required me to be thorough about the resources I used, which included only using peer reviews. I decided to use only these type of sources because they are credible unlike using just google and news articles. One of the ways I process the information I collected from my data was by grouping themes towards how my respondents answered my open-ended questions on the survey.
One of the challenges that I encounter during this academic research was connecting questions to my independent and dependent question. The strategies I used to overcome this challenge was asking my classmates and professor if they agreed with the questions I wanted to use for my independent and dependent questions to help measure my findings. Another challenge that I had was using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences and operating and reading the findings correctly. For example, I had a problem with understanding the bivariate coding, which used the two questions, “On a scale from 0-10, how much did this activity help improve you and your child’s/children’s relationship?” and “From the following choices, please choose the most appropriate level of completion for this activity?”.
My attitude and perceptions have grown more confidently towards working on research during the time of this course throughout the semester. The reason being is because I truly took my time in including details I found and being able to tie my findings of improvement towards parent involvement with recent studies that I added in my literature review. Another reason my confidence level has increased is that finding my data and understanding it helped me by showing how my hypothesis was supported. Overall thinking like a researcher is truly amazing. To think like a researcher includes being able to take the time to over evaluate your findings understanding different findings. It is important to understand the different type of readers that will be interested in your research, which is why we included a mixed method using qualitative and quantitative data.