Week #14

This week we are finishing off the course and presenting our findings to the class. I am quite proud of the work we have done within the JFK L3GS group. Although we did not achieve a representative sample I believe that the data we collected does demonstrate some interesting aspects of student life at Richmond. Stress plagues most university students, and most at Richmond are dealing with the added pressures of incorporating themselves into a new culture. It would be wonderful to think that the information we were able to gather could help towards future recommendations for students. I have enjoyed seeing what all the other groups have discovered through their research although I do feel that there were some unfortunate broad generalisations made about Richmond students. I believe it's easy to make such assumptions between the data collection and data analysis stage. When forming a conclusion it is tempting to generalise in order to make more applicable statements but I have discovered that you must be careful to understand the limitations of your research before making these assumptions.

Week #13

This week we are working on revising for the final exam as well as preparing to present the findings and details of our group research projects to the class. Presentation of findings is an extremely important part of the research process as it is the way you can communicate your own ideas and input with the rest of the research community. We have done a lot of work this semester and I feel like we do have something important to show for it so it is essential that we get this across in our presentation. Having been working on the project for some time now it is difficult to approach it again from an outsider's perspective and thoroughly explain to a group of people who have no previous knowledge of our work what we have been doing the past couple of months. Although I am a bit worried that we have still not decided on one or two important conclusions (we are meeting later on in the week to resolve this issue) I am very sure that we all fully understand how we got to this point and why our methods worked so efficiently. We also are very aware as a group what we would change if we had the chance to start over again. Our good communication within the group probably means that we will be able to communicate well with people outside the group too and hopefully we will be able to provide helpful information to the rest of the Richmond population.

Week #12

This week we are wrapping up our group research projects and beginning to review for the final exam. To be honest I am still having trouble coming away from our investigation with any solid conclusions that we can put into our power point presentation or include in my personal project. I think I may need to spend more time with SPSS to discover some more patterns but I am worried that my group as a whole has not come up with any common ideas on what we can take away from all the data we worked so hard to collect and record. As far as revision, I feel quite comfortable with the overall concepts, I just need to work a little harder to understand how to apply them to specific instances. I also plan to spend quite a bit of time before the exam reviewing vocabulary because there are still some terms I am not quite clear on and I want to be able to express myself clearly through writing regarding social research.

Week #11

This week I was very much looking forward to moving on to dealing with the qualitative, instead of quantitative research. I find quantitative research quite impersonal even though it is much easier to deal with in terms of complication and interpretation. However, it can be quite difficult dealing with all those numbers and extremely tedious entering them into SPSS thanks to all the little technical idiosyncrasies that arose along the way. Having become more familiar with the program over the past week or so it was interesting to finally be able to formulate some conclusions from the data we have worked so hard to gather and record. Using the analyse tab we were able to create graphs, tables, and discover the mean, median, mode, etc. of our data. This meant we were able to notice some patterns in our research. For example, marketing and finance majors seem more likely to turn to drugs and female students are more likely to turn to shopping or entertainment than male students who seem to prefer socialising. These are only noticeable patterns and we have not formulated solid conclusions yet. Unfortunately I was absent for Thursday's class so I have not seen the results of the interviews that my classmates conducted but I found the results of my interview very interesting and surprising.

Week #10

This week we are dealing with the long and complicated process of recording and interpreting our quantitative data. This involves the use of the program SPSS which I find quite difficult to use even though I have some previous experience with it. Certainly it is useful in generating meaningful conclusions but the actual entering of data has been quite complex as we have six group members, each with different data that has to be entered separately. We could have perhaps made this simpler by entering all the data at once but has functioned well up to this point using the philosophy of division of labor. It seems that our collecting of data was quite efficient using this method; even though we have not received as many completed surveys from each major as we would have hoped we ended up with a vaguely proportional model of the Richmond undergraduate students. I hope this will help validate our results when we finally get to them! I am looking forward to qualitative data collection and analysis as I find this much more interesting and relevant.

Week #9

This week are getting down to the business of actually conducting our surveys and distributing them to our participants. To be honest I am finding this process quite stressful as I feel quite short on time and I am worried that I will not be able to fill the quota of surveys that I am supposed to ensure are completed for my group. I feel like we have worked very well as a group so far and the way we have divided up the work has made things easier and more efficient for everyone involved. We intend to do the same with the interviews, data entry, and transcription so I am hoping this process will go smoothly. I am also hoping that the issue of fulfilling the appropriate sample size will be sorted out eventually. I am worried that we may have to rearrange things after the data has been collected which I know will make things difficult. I am enjoying learning further uses for the SPSS programs as I have previously used it only for statistics classes. I have now realized that SPSS can be used for human benefit as well.

Week #7

This week we worked on revising our surveys, interviews, and the information sheets we are going to provide for our participants. The changes JFK L3GS made were mostly to do with language; clarifying what we are trying to get across to those who take our surveys or those we interview. We discovered it was best to provide options in lieu of open answered questions, especially in situations where we knew exactly what sort of answers we wanted. In some ways this will limit variation of answers but overall it will make our research easier to compile, comprehend, and draw a conclusion from. If we can't draw a solid conclusion then there is really no point to the project.
We also had to revise our information sheet. We previously approached this document as a way to draw potential participants into the project, spark their interest and make them feel at ease with the whole process. We tried to accomplish through humor and lighthearted language but were instructed that this might cause the opposite effect and make our possible participants not take the surveys or interviews seriously enough. In lieu of humor we turned to clear, simple, but not degrading language that will explain to those who have had no previous knowledge of our research project what exactly we are trying to accomplish. Hopefully this will motivate them to join us!

Week #6

Now I think is the time we should begin conducting our surveys and collecting information on those who are willing to participate in further interviews. I have been beginning to think about how we will divide up this task as I am beginning to realize how much work this will actually take. As we are aiming to collect data from twenty-five students from each major I think we should perhaps assign each person in the group two or three majors to focus on as this will make it easier for everyone. I also think we should be very sure to hand the surveys out to more people than we actually require so that we have backup in case some of the data proves to be invalid or we do not receive a response from the student.
I found the articles we read on "bad" research fascinating. I have always wondered where those shocking statistics in newspapers come from but was naive enough to trust that they were provided by legitimate sources. I now find myself second guessing things I read, taking everything with a pinch of salt and trying to infer from the article how the research was conducted. Social research is more complex than people imagine and it is all too easy to be lazy with it and produce misleading information which is conveyed to the public as truth.

Week #5

This week we have been putting all of the past weeks' research and reading into practice. The process of creating a survey  for our project has been slightly more complicated than I expected, however my group does seem to have a certain knack for working together and I believe we are making good progress. As our topic, stress, is not something that can be easily counted or quantified we have had to be very careful with formulating questions that will be easy for our research subjects to understand while also being simple enough for us to translate into meaningful statistics. Our original idea was to provide a number of open ended questions searching for individual stories and specific situations. We have since learned that this would result in data that would be very difficult to interpret. While we are willing to make the effort to try and codify this sort of information it would be a shame to go through so much work only to end up with results we could not use or communicate to others. Therefore we have decided to work on more of a scale system, giving our research subjects a chance to note how often they participate in particular activities. I am hopeful this will result in more accurate and less complicated information that will allow us to formulate a solid conclusion. However, as we realize that stress is quite an individual subject we do not wish to generalize the Richmond student body and have decided to conduct more open ended interviews, in addition to the surveys, in which we can gather further, more detailed data that, although harder to codify, will inform our over all purpose and argument.

Week #4

This week it felt like our research project really got off the ground. After some research and detailed discussion I feel like a really understand what we, as a group, want to gain and learn from our project. I think we are all interested in the topic of stress but each of us is focused one one particular aspect. I hope this will result in a thorough and enlightening conclusion.
That being said, I am having a little trouble completely comprehending the idea of a sample. I understand why it is important to have a representative sample but I am still unsure as to how to efficiently create such a sample under individual circumstances. I am beginning to believe that it is nearly impossible to approach a project with a completely unbiased views. As we are dealing with humans there will always be some human error, some emotion or idiosyncratic detail, that will skew the data. This is the main flaw with the positivist approach, in my opinion.
I think JFK L3GS is struggling the most with how we will best avoid bias while finding a representative sample in the least complex way. Our current plan is to divide the Richmond undergraduate students into categories based on major and choose twenty-five random survey participants from each group. This way we will be able to compare reactions to stress among the different areas of study. My only qualm with this method is that this is not in fact a representative sample; the number of students within each major at Richmond is not equal. I do not believe this will have a great affect on our data but I am worried that we will not be following standard social research practices by following through with this plan. I am sure that further group meetings will resolve this confusion.  

Week #3

We have moved on in the research process this week from spewing out raw ideas to formulating them to a coherent question. In order to refine this question we worked researching the topic of stress to find out what other studies had been conducted regarding this concept and how researchers had interpreted the data that had been collected. It was surprising to find that negative stress among students is in fact a widely researched topic, at least more than I would have expected. In the last few years it seems that professionals have realized that anxiety is just as prevalent in schools and universities as it is in the workplace. From the five different pieces of literature that were presented by my research group it was made very clear that the level of stress is in fact equal between students and professionals.
 One piece in particular I found  very interesting; it dealt with foreign exchange students who were adapting to the new culture of their host university as well as college life itself. It suggested that cultural transitions can produce their own forms of stress that affect young people uniquely. I think this will be particularly relevant to our research here at Richmond since the majority of students here are new to British customs and culture.
Due to the overwhelming amount of research we have decided to narrow our research question to cover "how" Richmond students in particular deal with stress. It was suggested in a number of the projects we read  that it was all but futile to attempt to measure the level of stress in a student population as there were so many varying factors that could make the results misleading. We have decided to take the advice of our more experienced predecessors and focus our question so as to produce the most accurate and useful results.  

Week #2

This week we worked to find our own specific question regarding the quite broad topic of student life. On Tuesday we brainstormed many different ideas that covered a variety of different aspects; night life, drugs and alcohol, academics, and relationships on the internet. We finally settled on the topic of stress and realized that it encompassed many of the questions we had brought up before; students deal with stress in a variety of ways and their different coping mechanisms often involve going out, turning to drugs and alcohol, relying on friends, or seeking solace through the internet. So we have concluded that our overarching topic for this research question will be how do students at Richmond deal with stress? As stress can mean different things to different people and there are as many ways to cope with it as there are people we decided that an interview approach would be best for this particular question. A survey would not include the many quirks and unique aspects of the students here. On Thursday we decided on some questions that we need students to answer in order for us to formulate our conclusion.  These include asking students to define stress for themselves and then giving them broad questions to allow them to explain their individual coping mechanisms. 

Week #1

The first steps you need to take while planning a research project should be to clearly establish your research question and plan how you are going to collect the data. We worked to complete the first part of this step this week. We worked as a class to bring up a number of questions and topics that we were interested in researching. Beginning with very specific ideas, we moved through steps to group these under broader "umbrellas." Eventually we decided to make our overarching topic student life. Because there was such a large group consisting of many different people, it was difficult to decide on one single topic. There was some clashing of opinions but in the end we were able to establish our research question which I think will result in some interesting data. I have learnt that the research process involves compromising and cooperation. Teamwork is an important part of the process and I believe this will hold true throughout the rest of the course.