I have only done one or two research projects that are similar to this before. For most of my college career, research has been simply going onto the University Library’s (Greenwood library) website to look for peer reviewed journal articles. So, this research has not inherently changed much about how I go about researching, but it has taught me how to do a more thorough and scholarly way to go about research. This entire project has been a learning experience for me from creating the survey to analyzing the results and drawing up conclusions to writing my research paper. For one of the other projects I did, the professor I was researching under did the analysis of the data we collected and drew up some of the conclusions. However, I did help in creating the survey questions and survey distribution. For the other one, I feel like the research was not as thorough and did not go into as much detail as this one. That one specifically only relied on known data and one interview that I conducted over Zoom. For both of those research projects, the paper I wrote at the end was not structured the same way this latest one was. They did not have abstracts or literature reviews and I do not specifically remember having an actual labeled section for the data we analyzed. For the Family Fun Time research project that I did this semester, I had to write an abstract, introduction, literature review, a data and methodology section, a qualitative and quantitative findings sections, and a conclusion. This is far more scholarly than I’ve had to write before. This was also the first time that I had to go through and analyze the data that we received from the surveys we sent out.
For my sources, I went to the Greenwood library website and used the resources there to find peer reviewed journal articles. I searched for articles relating to family involvement and socioeconomic status. I found the ones that were most relevant to those searches by reading the abstracts and a little into the findings of each. I specifically avoided ones that did not relate to my topic or have finding that I did not think would be useful. Then, I asked my professor if they were good sources to use. Once she responded and gave me the thumbs up, I analyzed these sources to write up my literature review. I did not add or change any sources after this point.
The biggest challenge I faced during this assignment was writing the literature review because I have never done that before in such a scholarly way as this. I’ve certainly had to go and find peer reviewed journal articles and write papers on them. However, those were small, two-to-five-page papers, and all of them only required anywhere from two to five sources. For this literature review, I summarized seven different sources in about five paragraphs. I had more than a few corrections to make along the way to my final assignment. I also struggled a little bit with the data analysis because I had never used the computer program that we had used to do that. This was also my first time really analyzing data for a research project. We used Microsoft Excel to create a graph or pie chart from the data we analyzed, so I got to learn how to work with Excel a little bit. I overcame these challenges by asking my professor and group members a few questions in class and fixing the mistakes she pointed out in my literature review.
My attitudes and perceptions about doing research has changed. At the beginning of the semester, I felt slightly overwhelmed in knowing that we would be working on a research project throughout the semester while also learning the material we needed to learn. I do feel a little more confident in myself to do research, however I believe I will want to be a part of a research team that can help and support me through the process until I am completely confident in doing my own independent research. Or, I will at least want a team that would all be working on the same aspect of a research project until I am confident enough to do that part of a research project alone. This semester, I had a small team of three other people who were all viewing the same data that I was for creating the data analysis part of our final assignment. I feel like if I didn’t have those three people to help me when I had questions, then I would’ve been overwhelmed.
I think the phrase “think like a researcher” simply means that if I am put into a situation where I need to do scholarly or formal research, then I need to get myself into the mindset of the research process. In short, I would need to get a firm start with collecting previous data on the topic, then find the best way to collect new data from a large enough sample of people, then analyze that data and present it in a way that makes sense. I would need to take everything one step at a time to ensure the people I may be working with and I do not miss anything, skip any important steps, or rush through anything that should be given the proper amount of time.