Throughout my career, at Longwood University, my writing has improved a lot since high school. When coming to Longwood I knew that my writing needed work and was very nervous about the transition because of that. I graduated high school in June 2021 and started college soon after in August 2021. Coming in as a transfer, I knew that I would not be able to take the normal classes required for first-year students to improve my writing, so I had to take criticism as I wrote the different papers. Therefore for the different classes as I received this criticism I would continue to use it and take notes so that each paper I write gets continually better.
While looking through the different papers that I have written while here at Longwood University with an eye out for the different methodologies I found three papers that I believe show that I have not only learned the valuable skill of methods but also improved. My writing has improved both on an academic level and also on a methodological level, I am now able to write research papers the correct way, and in a way that is easy to read. That can be seen in my Social Research and Evaluations paper. That paper is the most recent, and while writing it I was shown multiple different ways to fix what I was doing incorrectly. When looking at my Psychology paper, which was one of my first there are many issues and different ways that I should have conducted the review of the research. Now knowing the ways that I could fix it I really wish I was able to, as I did not do much of a research examination. Then lastly, if you take a look at the paper I chose for Criminological Theory, this paper is still not perfect (is any paper really perfect though?), but it is improved, as this was a middle paper. In that class, we examined different theories of criminal justice and examined how they would apply to different films. You had to research the theory in-depth so that you could spot when it could be applied throughout the films. This class was another big stepping stone when it came to my writing abilities.
When doing survey research, you can examine the different descriptive, exploratory, and explanatory topics. You would want to choose the appropriate question forms, either questions and statements or open-ended and closed-ended questions. For a survey, you would want to make sure that the questions are straightforward, not double-barreled, relevant, preferably short, not biased, or negative. The respondents must be competent to answer, and willing to answer. The general questionnaire format should include uncluttered questions, one question per line, and a consistent format. Then once you receive the survey research you are able to examine and compare the answers. The same if you are doing interview-based research, although all of the questions are based open-endedly so that the respondent has a chance to answer the question in full.
When working in my career as a law enforcement officer, I can use the skills I learned in my social research class to create studies, and login data if needed. For example, if there needs to be a departmental study conducted, I would have a step up in preparing the surveys and collecting the data in a manner that is easy to read. I would also be able to present said data to whomever it may concern, as I would be confident in my answers and the data that has been received. I am currently in statistics, and I am not positive how I would be able to use that in my career quite yet, but I believe that it will be very useful.