My experience from this class will stick with me for the rest of my life. There were many things that I have learned. One of the major things that I have learned will be on how I conduct academic research. At the beginning of the semester, doing academic research was not easy. Being able to search for academic level research took me hours to find but after being taught a few simple tricks like reading the abstract, the introduction and the results section. Allowed me to search through vast amounts of information significantly faster and allowed me to find more quality research that pertained to my topic. The process on how I searched for viable sources changed greatly. I was able to apply strategies that allowed me to come through vast amounts of information instead of having to read half of a research study to find information that pertained to my topic. Several tips and tricks I learned were reading the abstract due to this having a synthesized overview of the entire research. From there I would read the introduction to verify with the abstract what the purpose of the research was. Then read the methods to see how they collected their data to check variables that are similar to how my methods were conducted. Making sure that the population and other variables like age and schooling were similar or not. The more similar the population, the better the representation that research could be when comparing them to my population. One of the major things I did focus on when conducting my research was how the other researchers conducted their research and on their population. This mattered because if their population was not similar to my population then it would be viewed as not a good comparison. The information from that research would not be valuable to my research if I wouldnt be able to tie in similar variables. I did have a few challenges when gathering initial research for my research. One of the major issues was where to even begin to find viable information. After finalizing my topic I started using certain keywords that would be similar to my topic. From there it was reading descriptions and if the description of the research sounded similar to the topic I was working on then I would then read the abstract and look up more information about their population in their methods. The strategies I used for overcoming the issues were trying to find populations similar to mine. This was difficult due to not being able to find a younger age population but I was able to substitute the population for thoses who were kindergarten age to highschool since children around this age still would have some form of parent involvement in their lives.
My confidence while doing academic research has improved due to now knowing how to find appropriate research that pertains to my research. It has given me a better appreciation for those who do research as a living due to how complex it can be. Even down to the creation of surveys to gather data was difficult due to how specific the wording needs to be. I found out how difficult it is to create a survey due to how important the answers are listed due to how the data can be interpreted. Trying to limit the questions like “did they mean this?” from an answer is important so there isn’t any “what ifs.” To “think like a researcher” one has to keep in mind a lot of things. You must think about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, how to go about finding information, and then analyzing the data and interpreting it. Overall you must think critically on what your topic is and be able to think outside of the box to be able to limit any potential issues that could arise while conducting research.