Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and there are many elements of my research project that, in hindsight, I would have done differently. But I suppose that is all part of the project. To try and fail and try again, because the best way to learn is to sometimes make mistakes.
If I was able to slip my past self some notes on what to do and what not to do it would go a little something like this.
- Although this is your curiosity, that doesn’t mean that it is the curiosity of the people you survey.
Next time I would make considerations that although this is my curiosity, that doesn’t mean that it is the survey population’s curiosity. When writing my surveys and interview questions I wrote them as if I was the person answering them, I expected the survey pool to responded with long, in depth discussions and answers to my questions. Whereas I often received one word answers or, if I was lucky, a sentence or two. If I revisited this topic and furthered my research I would write my questions so that they were much more easily answerable and would leave little room for disappointment in responses on my end. My issue was that I was expecting qualitative data from a quantitative research method, people don’t sign up to do a survey and expect to have to write a paragraph for every question. Because of this, in hind sight, I would have conducted a much simpler survey and then contacted my survey population to see if they were interested in further interview, I would hopefully interview more people than I did, to gain an even deeper understanding of the issues at hand
- Don’t wonder what you would do if something doesn’t go according to plan; know what you ARE GOING TO DO when it DOES NOT go according to plan.
In every instance of working with other people and relying on someone else it is essential to fully prepare for it to not go the way you expected. Now I’m not saying I hadn’t thought about what I would do if it didn’t go to plan. I’m saying I should have operated under the assumption that something WILL go wrong, and work in measures to help when it does inevitably go pear shaped. Just because you want your survey filled out or your questions answered, doesn’t mean someone wants to do your survey or answer your questions. I learnt that when conducting research, the only person you should rely on to do something is yourself, and then still… maybe not.
- Be prepared to not discover what you want to discover.
Despite the fact that we covered research bias in class, it feels practically impossible to not be bias towards your research. You always want an expected outcome, and to some degree that is okay. Its more about what you do to adapt your research when you don’t discover what you want, and you in fact discover something else. When conducting my research I expected the factors that affected students to be physical factors of the home environment, like the people they live with, their study set up, what they were eating or if they exercised. But what I discovered was that that was not it, or at least not the major component. So I adapted my project to suit my findings and to further understand what I had discovered.
Phoebe Mae 