• Question: If you have already done research, how did you conduct it and how would you use this experience to plan future research?

    Asked by Stephanie to Ben, Sam, Kirsty, Maggi, Rose on 14 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 14 Jun 2017:

      I recently conducted an experiment where participants had to read a short fictional story. I wanted one group of participants to become very absorbed in the story, and I wanted the other group of participants to be distracted from the story. So I gave the ‘distracted’ group a task to do while they read the story (they were asked to pick out words they thought would be confusing for an 11-year old). The funny thing was, when I ran the statistical analysis, I found that the ‘distracted’ participants actually became MORE absorbed in the story than the others! It was the wrong way round!
      When I first looked at the data, I felt like I had made a terrible mistake, but it has actually helped me to understand the processes involved in getting absorbed in a story a bit better. It is possible that the ‘distracted’ group actually paid ore attention to the story, because of the task they were asked to do. So now I am planning to run an updated version of the experiment, where I will give participants a different ‘distraction’ task that is completely separate from the story. I am also going to reconsider the story that participants read, and see if I can find another story that might help participants to become more absorbed.
      Mistakes in science are how me move knowledge forward, because they show us the things we weren’t expecting to happen – each discovery like that helps us to understand the thing we are studying a little bit better!

    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 15 Jun 2017:

      Hi Stephanie! Good question! My research was a questionnaire based correlational study. So I gave high school students a questionnaire to fill two times over the course of a year. This let me investigate how attached they were to various groups (their family, friends and school), and how this related to their health and behaviour. I found that feeling attached to all of the groups was linked to better mental health, but feeling attached to friends was associated with worse health behaviour (such as smoking, drinking and drug use).
      While my research went quite well, it was quite tricky having to arrange collecting questionnaires from the students around their exam time so next time I’d tried to do it at a different time of year to reduce disruption for students. I’d like to collect data over a few years too so I can measure the changes as the students get older. I also had to create codes for the students for their questionnaires so they could be anonymous, but often the students forget them so I would have to think of a better way of doing this in the future!
      That’s a great point you’ve made because there are always so many things you can learn from your research (even if it goes well!) and this is what you need to take forward to improve and develop your research in the future!

Comments