By conducting and evaluating this academic research, I have gained an insightful experience and understanding of the sociology field. Since I’m a psychology major, I’m familiar with writing academic research papers and conducting studies. However, I’m not familiar with applying my research to practical settings. With this research, our sample consisted of participants from actual local Head Start programs and the Andy Taylor Center. I’ve never conducted research with a sample that was representative of the population. Most of my research has been based on convenience sampling and participants signing up through the psychology research pool. Therefore, my psychology studies normally lack external validity because my sample is not generalized to the overall population. It was different and interesting conducting research and hearing feedback from parents about the surveys and activities. Based on this feedback, future classes will be able to manipulate the surveys and activities to make them more effective at measuring and increasing family involvement.
Furthermore, my process for conducting academic research is consistent with the techniques learned throughout this course. I have always started with a research question and then conducted a literature review to find background information supporting my hypothesis. I will emphasize that this course taught me a more efficient way to integrate and synthesize information from my sources. The instructor provided students with a literature review chart. By using this chart, I was able to categorize my sources into different themes. In addition, I was able to highlight the important aspects of each article (i.e. method, results, discussion) and then compare and contrast each article. This chart was very helpful when completing the literature review because I was able to keep important information about each article in order. For my literature review, I chose three central themes that I wanted to focus on which were parent involvement, socioeconomic status, and race. Using Longwood University’s library database, I used keywords like, “race and parent involvement,” in the search engine to try and find relevant articles. Several articles appeared as a result and I narrowed my search by selecting peer-reviewed articles within the last ten years. For the majority of the articles, I read the abstract and then skimmed the discussion section. It was a long process but I eventually found relevant articles for the purpose of my research.
With my experience of being a psychology major, I was familiar to writing APA-style research papers. However, writing the qualitative findings section of the research paper was difficult. This was a new experience and I wasn’t use to gathering themes from open-ended questions and then analyzing them. It was a tedious process because we had to go through and read the responses to all the surveys and then try and find key themes that kept reappearing. I defeated this obstacle by listing all of the themes I found within the articles then narrowing them down. Some of the themes were similar and therefore I chose to combine them. For example, children learning to cut with scissors and use glue was common. Children learning shapes, counting, and colors were also another consistent theme. Therefore, I combined these two themes into one labeled developing fine motor and cognitive skills.
Overall, both my attitudes and perceptions about conducting research have changed over the course of this semester. I’m now more adaptive to different research techniques. I have the ability to analyze and integrate information into one common theme in order to effectively communicate that information. I also gained experience with inputting code into RStudio which is a new software that I had never used before. I was familiar with using Jamovi and SPSS but now I have some experience with using a different database. In addition, I have more experience with running statistical analyses and using that information to come to a conclusion about the data. Through the process of gathering relevant background information, creating a survey to measure specific SMART objectives, and evaluating the feedback received from the surveys, I think I’m able to grasp the concept of what it means to think like a researcher. To think like a researcher means to try and find gaps within existing literature for your research to expand. In addition, it means to evaluate information and critique it in order to make the research and study better in the future.