My process for doing academic research has changed since the beginning of the semester in the way of I now know how to conduct academic research since this a new skill I recently acquired. I have never had to do research in this depth and now after conducting such research I have a greater understanding on how to handle the process of research. The process of evaluating research and selecting sources was a bit of a challenge because it was difficult to find sources that played into what specific areas I wanted to focus on. There was also many sources to choose from and to find one that fit best with my research was a challenge. I was able to keep all sources I originally started with because they all were necessary during the whole process.
Some challenges I encountered while doing research were that while completing the quantitive section, making the tables and figuring out what data to put was a bit confusing to me. I overcame this challenge by asking questions and making sure I had a better understanding of what I was doing before continuing on. My attitude and perception on doing research have changed over the course of this semester because before this semester I did not know how to approach conducting research in general or how to input data into Excel. These are skills I now have and can use in the future.
I believe to “Think Like a Researcher” means to look at research from all different types of perspectives and make sure that the research is meaningful in some way. Also, it means that you have to remain completely unbiased and remain focused on the research. For this particular research, there were surveys and as researchers we had to look past personal feeling towards participants and only look at the data. Those are things I feel are ways to “Think Like a Researcher.”