I’ve learned a lot this semester in my Social Work 3401H Discovering Evidence class. I came into the class thinking I already knew all about research, but quickly found out that I still have a lot to learn. Much of what I’ve learned in this class will be very helpful as I begin to do my own research project. Knowing about research designs, as I’ve mentioned in past posts, will help me to decide which design is best for my research question. I’ve also learned about how to carry out searches of existing evidence, how to conduct literature reviews, and how to find and critically appraise systematic reviews. All of these skills will be extremely helpful as I examine the current state of research related to my research topic.

For two of the papers in my 3401H class, I’ve chosen to focus on school-based mental health stigma reduction and prevention interventions. This is the exact topic about which I’m interested in doing my own research. I examined a systematic review on this topic, as well as a number of other articles. From doing this work, I already have some idea about the current state of research on this topic. I will need to do a more exhaustive review of the current literature before I begin designing my own project, but from what I already know, there are obvious gaps in research which I can work to fill with my project. For example, most research in this area is not designed as rigorously as it could be, and therefore its credibility is questionable. By ensuring that my study’s sample size is as large as possible and that I use randomization and controls, I can make a meaningful contribution to the existing body of research. I’m looking forward to continuing to examine existing research and then using it to decide exactly how my study should be designed.

My Discovering Evidence class has taught me a lot about research in general and especially about research in the field of Social Work, and I can definitely see that what I’ve learned will be very helpful when I go to design and carry out my own research project over the next year and a half. Before changing my major to Social Work and taking this class, I was pre-med and majoring in Neuroscience. I’ve always liked science and math, and I did research with a post-doctoral researcher in an entomology lab on OSU’s campus during high school, designing and carrying out my own research project related to honeybees. I have, therefore, some experience with the basics of research designs in science, but what I find fascinating about research in the social sciences is how much more complex it all is. I think that society tends to see social sciences as “soft” or “easy” compared to “hard sciences” like chemistry and biology, but what I’ve learned, having had some experience in both now, is that social sciences are actually much more complicated because they involve human beings.

Using the terminology I’ve learned in my Discovering Evidence class, what I’m used to doing is quantitative research, which focuses on large sample sizes, controls, and other aspects of research which ensure the most accurate possible numerical results. This works for chemistry experiments, but in social sciences it does not capture the whole picture. In social sciences, qualitative research is often used because it acknowledges the humanity of participants, and results are often the words of participants rather than numbers which describe them. I’d never thought of this as a way to conduct research before learning about it in this class, but it certainly makes sense based on the goals of social science research. Qualitative research can even be used to empower participants, meaning that the process of conducting the research can have value, whereas quantitative research tends to just be focused on finding meaning in numerical results. Finally, we also learned that a lot of research in social work uses mixed methods, meaning that it combines both qualitative and quantitative research methods in order to most effectively achieve its purpose.

While before taking this class I probably would have been able to identify that there’s a difference between quantitative and qualitative research, I didn’t have the language to explain this distinction and certainly didn’t have enough awareness or knowledge to go about designing my own research based on an understanding of it. I have learned many other things in my Discovering Evidence class which I know will also be useful in designing my own research, ranging from how to go about effectively exploring the existing literature on an issue to how to understand statistics and use them to find meaning in the results of research. I know I will use many of the things I’ve learned in this class when I begin to look into choosing my own topic and designing a research study, but I think one of the most meaningful things I’ve learned is simply the difference between quantitative and qualitative research. Knowing that difference is helping me to understand my own strengths and weaknesses in social science research based on my background in strictly quantitative research in the hard sciences.

[The Home Page will show a running blog of your recent posts, which are categorized and show on that category’s page. Please delete this post or edit with your own information.]