Journal Entry #1 - How Have I Researched?

After reading through the research models, including the ACRL standards, and viewing the research language presentation reflect on your practice of research to this point in your career as a student.  How do you research?  What strategies do you use that are successful?  What difficulties do you encounter? Have you engaged in primary research?  Or is it primarily secondary research? What strategies and methods do you hope to learn this semester?

Reading through the research models brought to mind a lot of different ways that I have conducted research over the years.  I can only recall two times where I have conducted research using surveys or questionnaires.  One used open ended questions and the other closed ended or multiple choice questions.  I have done some quasi experiments, mostly setting up tests for children to see how they score, but there are often difficulties in working with experimental groups and accurately comparing them to control groups.  I find that I have mostly conducted different types of qualitative research over the years. 

According to Dr. Luo's lecture on research methods in Library and Information Science (LIS), qualitative field research involves observing social phenomena in a natural habitat as opposed to an artificial experimental setting.  I have done this type of research when observing and recording interactions between between librarians and patrons in my LIS studies and interactions between children, their peers, and adults for my child development studies. 

I have been both the outsider observer, having no contact or interference with the events being observed, and an interactive observer, asking the participants questions about how they interpreted the situation I was observing.  I find being an outside observer give me the most non-bias ability to interpret my observations, but that being an interactive observer does allow for the best knowledge of what those in the experiment were motivated by.

While I have conducted some types of primary research by collecting data through the use of questionnaires and observations, I find that I have mostly conducted secondary research.  A large majority of my research up to this point has been done by using other primary research to collect data on groups and phenomenons that I would not normally have access to.  The instances where I have done primary research has been done on a much smaller scale. 

I hope to sharpen my skills for developing and conducting primary research throughout this semester.  I feel that in the immediate future I will want to use different types of primary research to collect data on a local level about what patrons, youth and adults, want, need, or expect from their library.  This data would then be used to help develop programs that are custom fitted to the needs of our patrons which will generate support and boost library usage.