This semester has come with a lot of opportunities to grow and shape my view of my future profession. Before this course, social work was what I wanted to do; I thought I had found my perfect niche. This course revealed to me that there are a lot of problems in social work. These problems arise both because the profession isn’t perfect, and also because we’re working within a fallen world anyway. However, now I have a new purpose as I seek to join this profession. That purpose is to better this profession that I love from this inside out, and I really think that conducting and producing research can do just that. Before this class, I planned on conducting research that sounded interesting to me. I didn’t take into account actual questions that needed answers, or what areas of research were lacking in the profession. Now, however, I feel like my vision is refocused, and I am much more concerned with satisfying the needs of my profession than satisfying the needs of my own inquiry.
About Me
Qualitative v. Quantitative Research Reflection
Initially, after learning, reading, and researching about these to methods of approaching research in the social work field, I found myself immediately drawn towards quantitative research. Numbers make sense to me and it seems incredibly logical and convenient in theory for me to be able to reduce the human experience into a data set of numbers which I can then calculate and compute to give me a meaningful answer. However, it’s become clear to me over these past few weeks through studying and reading more qualitative studies, that they can be an incredibly valuable resource to actually understanding with and sympathizing with the material we are researching. I believe that qualitative research gives the researcher as well as the person applying the conclusions reached from the research into practice a good understanding of the human component and nuances that go into implementing interventions. Often, it seems that qualitative research can explore the complexities a little more delicately than quantitative research might be able to because the data is becoming synthesized into numbers. Qualitative research does have it’s downfalls though. While all forms of research is subject to various biases, it would seem that qualitative research has a higher risk because, instead of interpreting numbers and calculations, we must interpret human thoughts, feelings, and experiences, which are much less concrete variables. It also may be harder to reach a definitive, mathematically supported answer to the question being posed. Ultimately, I believe mixed methods approach could take the advantages of both methods and combine them so that the research covers both the concrete evidence presented through quantitative researched with the complex insight of the qualitative research.
About Me
My name is Natalie Stewart and one day I hope to work with children in some capacity. I’m not sure whether or not I want to go into child welfare, the foster-care system, or work for after-school programs/camp and child enrichment programs. Because of my interests, I would like to focus my research on how different factors influence the experience of childhood in different people, and how that shapes their future adult life. Having worked with children in several different capacities for the past several years, I have many anecdotal observations about how different factors effect different children, but it would be interesting to be able to have actual research to either confirm or reshape my personal observations. I hoping this course will give me a good framework on how to go about effective and efficient research methods to accomplish this goal.
