Writing up this week's assignment (Erina)

Hi peeps, 

So, as I wrote the first draft of this week’s assignment, I found this week’s readings very pertinent to my research. I am currently at the stage where I am moving from formulating a research question to looking for appropriate research methods. As you may already know, I think I will be using a questionnaire to conduct my research. And while most of this week’s readings provided information on quantitative research methods and considerations, I found some points particularly relevant. For example, it was helpful to know that face-to-face inquiries may be useful to ensure that participants are completing questionnaires as expected and that highly structured surveys can restrict the responses from respondents (Knight, 2002). These are considerations I will have to be aware of as I finalize my research method. 

This week I struggled to find a way to define key terms in my second assignment because there are so many different types of online learning formats offered in schools and by private companies. It was, therefore, helpful to read Davidson and Layder’s (1994) book on how definitions can have significant implications on official statistics. In light of what I have learned, I will need to double-check if there is a problem with how I define terms in my assignment.  

Finally, an ancillary note about organizing the papers I read. I began tracking the journal articles I was reading by noting them on an Excel file, but I started hitting difficulties as the number of journal articles piled on. I had trouble organizing journals by topic because our thoughts are not necessarily linear. I found a free software called FreeMind that allowed me to make mind maps of my ideas and create hyperlinks to the relevant pdf files on my computer. I am sure those of you who have conducted research before have tricks to facilitate the reading process but wanted to throw this one in there. Also, please let me know if you have other methods to track papers and notes! I appreciate it!


Davidson, J. O’C., & Layder, D. (1994). Official statistics and social research. Chapter 3 in Methods, Sex, and Madness (pp. 61-82). New York: Routledge. 

Knight, P. T. (2002). Small-Scale Research: Pragmatic Inquiry in Social Science and the Caring Professions. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

 

Comments

  1. KaitlinOctober 16, 2020 at 7:58 AM

    Hey Erina, What an interesting reflection on to the readings and how they contributed to your project. I hope your second assignment is going well. I tend to take a very basic approach when organizing journal articles and my notes, however I think it works quite well. Basically, I will include the journals that relate to specific points as sub bullets in my paper outline, as well as at the end of my outline, where I have a rough bibliography section. This makes it easier for me to keep track of which points relate to which journals without forgetting to include anything in my references.

    I hope that helps,

    Kaitlin

    ReplyDelete
  2. ErinaOctober 19, 2020 at 1:21 AM

    Hi Kaitlin- That's a useful tip! Thanks! I think I may try that for the next upcoming assignment.

    ReplyDelete

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