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.