Throughout the semester in Sociology 345 my process for doing academic research has changed substantially. At the beginning of the semester when I would have thought about academic research, I thought that for this process it would be very simple. You would only have to find a few sources, write about what you found and then that would be it. I realized through the course of this semester that my understanding of the academic research process was completely wrong. I found that when doing academic research, it is important to find articles that will pertain to the hypothesis or argument that you are going to be making, not the general idea that you are going to be discussing. I also found that most of the research that must be done also has to be logged and analyzed in a very particular way, for example, when analyzing the research that was done within class, we had to use an outside analytics software in order to code the mass amounts of data that we had received. At the end of the semester my process on doing academic research has changed greatly, I now have a better understanding on how to analyze and pull data out of articles to further prove the point that is trying to be made.
When evaluating sources to use for my academic research, I would first make sure that the website I am using is credible and displays peer reviewed articles. After I have made sure of that (typically use either google scholar or JSTOR for those peer reviewed sources) I secondly type into the search bar what I am trying to find out of these web services, for example: Parental involvement and child engagement, Child education, etc. After I have found an article that may seem of use, I then go through and read the abstract in order to decide if this article would be of any help or not. It is also important to note that on google scholar that it shows you how many times any article has been cited, I like to find articles that have been cited numerous times. After reading the abstract, if the article would be of use, I go through the article highlighting or taking notes on any key points that may be useful in my own research review. Going through this process helps myself with narrowing down sources that I know would be helpful to me throughout the entire process of an academic research assignment, because of this process I did not have to go back and add or delete any sources that I had submitted with my annotated bibliography.
When conducting my research for this assignment I had a hard time finding sources that would be applicable for the research that I was conducting. When trying to find proper articles, it seemed to be a common theme that they were not at all related to what I was trying to research. In order to overcome this problem, I had to pull many different articles from both google scholar as well as JSTOR. I also had to widen my search to articles that may be under a different type of research. For example, when trying to find articles pertaining to parental involvement and child engagement, I kept finding myself stuck with outdated articles that had nothing to do with what I was trying to research. To fix this problem I went back to the search and instead searched topics by themselves alone such as “parental involvement” or “child engagement” this helped widen the search area to articles that may be of better use for my research.
Throughout my entire academic career, I was never entirely confident in my ability to conduct an academic research assignment, I was always confused on how to find the correct sources, what information to pull out of those sources, how to properly conduct a survey if applicable, and most important how to analyze data through descriptive statistics. Throughout this past semester of collegiate career, my confidence in my skills as a researcher have been boosted astronomically. I now have a better understanding of what information to pull from sources that will be most useful in my own research, I have great experience with conducting analysis of data, my knowledge of research has overall increased. For example, before this past fall semester of the 2021 academic year, I did not have the proper knowledge to conduct an academic research assignment on my own. I did not know how to properly format a literature review or even know how to conduct one, I can now with my own expertise conduct and perform an entire literature review with no help.
In my own words, to think like a researcher means to be persistent, curious, and passionate about the work you are doing. It means to be able to step back and examine any piece of literature or study and adopt a critical way of thinking through any different type of scenario. It means to be patient, valuing the time that it takes to ensure proper and dedicated research. It means to be keen and sharp to abstract the most valuable information from any different piece of literature or writing. It means to be vigilant in your work, being aware of any false information or wrongdoing in the act of researching. Most importantly it means to be adaptable to any different problem that may arise. Research studies are like snowflakes, no singular study is going to be the same as another, there are always different ways and methods or different problems that may arise.