Thursday, April 2, 2009

My Research Process

I have found through the research process so far, I have been in very foreign territory as I have found myself questioning everything I write down. The research process is a very complex way of researching and I for one have found it very difficult to understand especially the referencing of so many research resources like; articles, journals, text books, web site etc. The list goes on, as does my confusion as putting all of the resources information together does take time.

I found that asking questions is not a bad thing, and that no one is perfect. This helped me to understand the outlines that you must take to process the information that is provided in so many different forms.

· Looking at the research question provided, and reading it over a few times and looking up definitions that I don’t understand.
· Breaking up the research question into smaller parts and seeing if I can reword the question for my own understanding.
· Using the key words from the question, look up search engines using them.
· Reading articles using the key words to see if they jump out as it is quicker and more efficient.
· Using a brainstorm to decide order of writing.
· Using examples and comparing.
· Tying information all together.

Collaborative research:

Through the past few weeks my research has been involvement with my collaborative group task, where I am join by two other of my class peers and we come up with a research question/query that we have to research and prove fact of fiction.

We have taken different steps to come up with a decisive question/query. First we all went away and came up with different questions that we could research, we then came together and looked through the research questions that we came up with, disregarding questions that were too broad or not enough research material to help us in the research of that topic. We then broke down the question to which we were all interested in and also happy with. Our next step was to see if we were to do that topic that we had information that we could use. Then our last step in the process to getting the right question/query was to see if our lecturer agreed and to also help break it down again to make the topic we were about to research specific.

· Does massage support the rituals an athlete goes through before an event to address anxiety levels?

Next was the methodology which we had help from our lecture again and we came up with the idea of a questionnaire to receive good information for or topic question.

Again our group went away and came up with different questions that could be relevant to the topic. We then all met up and put together a few questions that could be possible to use. Then from the questions put together we will show our lecture getting her views on the topic.
We then have to look at the literature review so we all took two different physiological effects of massage on the human body and also to incorporate the fact that we are also seeing he anxiety levels of athletes.

Through this time this is what my collaborative group has come up with. I have found working with my peers on the topic a lot easier as I find that I sometimes get lost. It is great to be able to work with and learn from others in my class as I have learnt a lot from the way that they take the whole research process, also how they cope with it.
I find that research isn’t my speciality and that I do need to work on it. I am learning new skills and happy that I am able to apply them to my research.

Resourses:
Class notes.
My thoughts

2 comments:

  1. Hi Victoria
    This is great stuff but just difficult to tell whether you are doing blog 1 or blog 3 here? It works really well as the Your Search Process Blog (no. 3) - the research process blog is looking at the distinctive parts of the process for a proposal?
    Just let me know and I will tick the boxes accordingly.
    FM

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