When I Think of Research...

During the first couple of weeks of the course study, I thought that research was as simple as a tool that people use to study every field. One can just simply follow the instructions of the tool step by step: selecting a topic, searching the literature, formulating a research issue or question, designing research methods, collecting data, processing and analyzing the data, drawing research conclusions, and writing a research report. Research is “… a series of the steps - from selecting a topic through to writing the final research report - that must be followed to generate research" (MacNaughton, 2010). When I was faced to design research and collect data, big differences emerged between performing research on natural phenomena and on the field of childhood studies. Such differences include ethical considerations, power relationships, children as the study objects, and so on.

There are the issues one should deal with during the steps of designing the research and collecting data. Being equity is an important factor that needs to be considered to research; it is embedded in power relationships, deficit models, homogeneity, and reflexivity.  For example, when samples are not randomly selected, could bias the research to find unrepresentative results that influence many people in their life and social statues. Another insight I have learned was the step of process/analyze data. I had thought this step is more objective than the other steps. I had thought that the step of process/analyze data strong relates to the step of designing the research that should conduct a framework for analyzing data, and relates to the step of collecting data, which is also objective. However, when the data is collected from children evolved, I found that analyzing the data was not the same as analyzing data from natural elements, in that it is not objective and quantitative.


Reference
Mac Naughton, G., Rolfe, S.A., & Siraj-Blatchford, I. (2010). Doing early childhood research: International perspectives on theory and practice (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill