Social Research Reflection
Carol Dixon
SOCL 345: Social Research and Program Evaluation
Dr. Pederson
12/4/2023
Social Research Reflection
Over the past four months, my social research class at Longwood University has collected data involving family involvement in the Head Start community. This semester I was in both classes that worked with Headstart to not only produce the activities but also perform program evaluations on the activity. Before taking social research with Dr. Pederson, I had little knowledge of what program evaluation was. I understood the needs assessment and did survey research to see if the effectiveness of the program was achieved. Needs assessment is research before starting a program to see the main problems and needs that particular community needs before spending time and money on a program. Ethics was also taught because it is mandatory to consider ethics while doing research and working with people.
Through this process, we were split into groups to begin the research process on our specific activity and independent variable. My research topic was Race’s impact on Family Involvement, which was sparked by people’s stereotypes of certain races and their family life and I wanted to see if it was true or false. To begin my research, I had to first see what other scholars found with their research to help support my argument on family involvement in various races. After researching the literature, it was time to focus on the importance of the topic and see how it could relate to the data we were conducting on activities given to Head Start children by the students in the other classes and myself.
Being in both classes made me a liaison between my groups in both classes. This was a difficult task because it was hard to balance being the leader of both of the groups at the same time. Within both of these groups, some of my cohorts weren’t involved with the project, but it was hard to balance who was participating and trying to complete the project. In the end, both projects ended up great, but for social research, it was difficult due to a low response rate to get a general idea of the impact of the activity given out. Receiving a low response rate was discouraging at first because I thought there was an error in our surveys that made participants not want to respond. But, there can be many reasons why the participants didn’t respond to our survey like they were busy or didn’t have time to. The main goal was family involvement and ensuring families were provided activities to promote family involvement. This taught me to not be automatically discouraged because research is not that easy and takes time and patience since you are dealing with humans. Although this was a difficult-to-navigate situation between both classes, it gave me the skills and knowledge to move forward with conducting research in the future. Doing this gave me the courage to lead my group to complete our assigned task which was to analyze the survey data we received and form connections to our research. Since we only received one response regarding our assigned project, we were assigned to use previous data from the past three years, 2019, 2022, and 2023. This way we could analyze these results to be more general and relate them to our topic of research. I learned how to correctly perform evaluation data during this research project. This skill is beneficial for me when it is time for me to start my career. It can show future employers that I have the skills to research, program implementation, and program evaluation.