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.