Through this semester of Social Research and Program Evaluation, I learned how to more thoroughly read through sources and critically think about the author’s research and formulate my own opinions through multiple sources.
I would evaluate sources through a brief read-through of the abstract and a skim over the rest of the article and if it contains what information that I would need I would more thoroughly read through the article to the information that I needed and past the information that is required to get more context behind the conclusions or statements being made. I had to add some sources to my annotated bibliography because my literature review was not put together properly and had holes in some points that I would use to reinforce the statement behind the paper and project.
The challenge I encountered while doing research for this class was finding academic articles that talked about parental involvement in school. I overcame this by going through multiple databases to find articles that talked about parent involvement in schools and where my topic fit in with it.
My confidence about doing research has increased ten-fold over this semester because if have found reputable databases that hold information on a variety of different topics and I now know more about finding information and pulling critical thoughts out of those articles.
To “think like a researcher” means to me is digging to find corroborating information from multiple reputable sources that either confirm or deny original thoughts. Pulling out the important information and gaining context on a point or argument that is being made.