Step 1: Create a page in your E-Portfolio where you list out the different courses that you took that dealt specifically with methods. For each of those courses, write down some key concepts that you learned from that class.

Research Methods:

• Qualitative Data
• Quantitative Data
• Creating surveys
• How to conduct research
• Type of Data (Nomimal, Interval/Ratio, Ordinal)
• Literature Review, Research Question

Statistics:

• SPSS and RStudio
• Doing Statistical Evaluations by hand
• Analyzing data (both quantitative and qualitative)

Medical Sociology:

• How to write a grant
• Inequalities and inequalities in the medical field
• Healthcare
• Ways to help your community
• Comparing differences in health behaviors and healthcare between the US and other countries
• How it is easier to choose unhealthier styles of living because of the prices and accessibility
• Fundraiser, ways to help your community

Senior Seminar for Criminal Justice Professionals:

• Policy Analysis
• Career Preparation

Issues in Policing

• Issues, Inequalities, and Inequities in the US Criminal Justice System
• Case Studies

Step 2: From those classes find three papers that you wrote that reflects learning that you did in those classes.  Discuss how you think your writing about methodology has changed over those three papers.  You can talk about how your writing has become more sociological, the structure of your writing, or your writing ability in general (250 words)

Throughout my metrology courses, my writing in reference to research has changed significantly. The biggest part of my writing that has changed has been seen through the literature review for each of these papers. As you look through the literature reviews for each paper, it is apparent that I got much better at writing and synthesizing information in the most recent paper. Furthermore, the language and diction that is used in the earlier paper are much different than the language and diction that is used in the most recent paper. Moreover, my writing has become much more scholarly and professional over the years of taking methodology courses. In addition, it is clear that my ability to read and analyze data to interpret the information into writing has changed over the years, as the language and data are portrayed much more professionally and use statistical language to illustrate data the data received. I think it is also interesting to point out that my metrology courses have helped me structure my papers better, as they flowed better and overall were easier to comprehend in the most recent paper.

Step 3: Create a page in your E-Portfolio and discuss the major aspects of social research methodology that you believe are central to understanding the social research process.  You can focus on specific concepts of the overall process (750 words or less)

The social research process is a long and intricate process that includes multiple major aspects. It starts off with developing a research question that you are interested in and then creating a literature review to gain an understanding of what previous scholars have found on your particular topic. The process then moves into deciding what type of data you think would be best to receive the data with to ensure the most accurate response. Once you have decided what data you would like to receive, you then make the appropriate tools to get that data, whether you want to schedule interviews to get some qualitative data, or if you want to create a survey and get some quantitative data, or even if you feel it would be best to get both qualitative and quantitative data, which also could be met through giving out surveys. After creating a method to gather data, you will want to start to collect that data. After collecting it, you read, look at, analyze, comprehend, and interpret it to make sense of the data given. Furthermore, after understanding the data or even to understand the data, you will want to put the data into categories and code it. Once you have interpreted the data and made it the easiest way to read and understand the data, you will want to interpret the findings and results and form the findings and results into writing and find out if there is a significant difference or if you have ended up with a null hypothesis between your independent and dependent variables. One of the biggest aspects that I find to be most important is the initial literature review. The literature review is a highly intricate and important part of the social research process as it allows you to gain an understanding of what previous scholars have found in reference to the topic in which you are researching. Furthermore, having the literature review will allow you to understand more about your topic at hand and be able to add data to previous work. Moreover, the initial steps of creating a hypothesis and research question are extremely important, as those are the key aspects that your research will be based on. In addition, once you have an idea of what you will be researching, it will help guide you with what type of data you will want to collect for the most accurate results, whether that be qualitative data through interviews or quantitative data through surveys. Sometimes you may even want to have both qualitative and quantitative data to provide the most accurate data. Furthermore, it was also an amazing learning experience to learn the complicated process of creating surveys and learning how to distribute them amongst a sample size. In addition, learning about deciding how to categorize the data once it was collected, and being able to interpret the results from the categorization was an amazing learning experience and overall interesting to do. Learning about the research process and being able to go through the research process was an amazing opportunity and gave me a lot of valuable knowledge that I could use in my future.

Step 4: Utilizing your industry reflections, how could you use the skills and knowledge learned in your research methods and statistics courses to help you perform the duties of the job you are seeking? (250 words) 

With being a police officer, there may be a time when researching and looking at data on crime rates and high crime areas may be helpful in where you should patrol. Hot spot policing and community-based policing are both evidence-based practices, which in turn tell us if they are working or not working. Having these evidence-based practices will allow police officers to have the option of using the best overall approach to policing to have a safer community. In addition, looking at data and being able to read data is highly important, as it’s one thing to collect and have data but that data means nothing if you can not read it. Moreover, having a background in research methods and statistics has given me valuable skills to be able to read, comprehend, and interpret that data. Furthermore, you must be able to write in professional language and tone when writing your official sworn police reports and memorandums. Having a college-level writing background and learning the social research process with helping me to become successful in writing clear and concise reports that can be read clearly and easily comprehensible.