I have learned a lot of things from my time at Longwood University. One of the courses I have learned a lot of understanding from was Social Research and Program Evaluation. Because of this course, I have learned many skills and experiences that I can utilize in future occupational settings. Before I took this course, I had no understanding of how to conduct research or how to evaluate it. I also had no understanding of how to analyze quantitative and qualitative data. At the beginning of the semester, I struggled to write a proper academic research paper. In courses prior to this, I had only gained an understanding of how to read academic research papers, but I had no understanding of how to figure out if the information found was opinionated or factual. This course has given me the knowledge of how to look through academic literature and determine if its information is factual or opinionated and whether the information is important to note in my own research. I decided what sources to use and which not to use by determining which sources provided the most recent and notable data on the research topic. I have also gained an understanding of how to organize and write an academic research paper using the evaluated sources. I kept all my original academic articles from start to finish when conducting my research because I felt that they satisfied what I needed to know for my research. It wasn’t until the Social Research and Program Evaluation course that I would gain an understanding of how to conduct research from scratch. I have gained a better understanding of the steps of how research is conducted and how much time and effort truly goes into it.
This course has taught me that all researchers encounter challenges when conducting research and it is to be expected when I am conducting my own. A challenge I encountered while I was conducting research was coding the data that was acquired through the survey created that was sent out with the family fun time activities into a system called R studio. Before taking this course, I had never used R studio or a system like it before, so I found it confusing and frustrating at first when coding my data. However, I overcame this challenge by asking questions when needed and by playing around with R studio. Another challenge I encountered while doing research was the response rate only being 20%, these caused the data to be limited. I found is hard to answer the research question “how do family fun time activities affect family involvement?” because there was not enough data to see a clear pattern or relationship between the dependent variable and the independent variable. I overcame this challenge by being honest about the response rate and stating that that was no clear pattern between the variables. Overcoming these challenges has taught me the importance of having patience when it comes to academic research because it takes time to go through all the steps but it all comes together in the end.
Coming into this course at the beginning of the semester, I was not confident in conducting and analyzing my own research and data. However, my perception and attitude toward research changed once my understanding of the process grew. I feel more confident now in my ability to do research since I have learned the process by which to conduct research, read previous literature, and how to organize and to present my findings. I also gained a better comprehension of looking at quantitative and qualitative findings. I knew for sure I gained these skills from this course when I was given the task of finding 15 academic research articles for an academic paper in another course and I was able to do it with confidence. I was able to organize and understand all of the previous findings I found and organize them into one cohesive organized paper. I think that “think like a researcher” means to think deeper about topics and be curious and ask questions to better understand them. I think that is important to learn and explore new things and ideas while conducting research that way you can have the best comprehension and knowledge.