Friday, February 19, 2016

Researching How to Analyze my Research

Welcome back to my blog! I hope everyone has had a productive and wonderful week. I, for one, have interacted with more people this past week than I have in probably my entire life due to my new job. Although many conversations centered around the presence of people’s dogs in the car (and in one case, a cat!!), I was able to discuss my research as well. I have been able to educate coffee-drinkers all across the valley about synesthesia, which in my opinion is one of the greatest parts of this research. Hopefully, as more time goes on people will be more educated on the topic and able to identify their own synesthesia or synesthesia in their family or friends. Although I have been discussing it a lot, I have also been continuing to implement my research and learning how to analyze the results.

In order to learn how to analyze my results I had to do some research. Thanks to United States General Accounting Office, I learned more about content analysis’s, when to use them, how to implement them, and how to analyze the results of them. Here is what I learned.

Step one: summarize the coded data. The easiest way to summarize the coded data is by observing the frequencies of each category. For example, in the table I provided last week the frequency of references to nature was higher than the frequency of references to industry.

Step two: discover patterns and relationships. So after identifying the frequencies it is important to compare them. In my case, I will be observing how the frequency of nature and industry compare to the frequency of synesthesia. So far, the frequency of synesthesia did not differ due to the changes in the number of references to industry or nature (spoilers! This week’s research will change these results, but you’ll have to wait until next week to see that). These patterns and relationships are the most important part of my research, because this is where answers to my question will begin to bloom.

Step three: test hypotheses. My hypothesis for my research is that with increased industry, there will be a decrease in the number of references to synesthesia. My hypothesis is based on a couple of ideas. Since the industrial revolution caused a change in lifestyle (the rise in trains caused goods to be more available from all around the world, people moved from an agrarian lifestyle to cities, and ideologies changed, whether to protect people’s work rights or safety in factories) I believe that there was a shift in language as well, thus changing how synesthesia is portrayed.

Step four: relating the results to other data obtained. Essentially, this portion of my results section will be identifying how the results I obtained play into the academic conversation. Unfortunately, there is not much of an academic conversation to be had. Overall there is little research done on how synesthesia is portrayed in literature, much less due to historical events, so my research will be influential in beginning it.

Hopefully this is not the only discussion I will be beginning. Comment below, and I’ll respond! It can be about anything you would like, whether it's about my research or the awesome cat that I saw. Thanks for reading and see you next week!

Word count: 552

1 comment:

  1. Hi Masha! It's great to read about how your research is going! I was wondering though, how did you figure that a change in language changed the portrayal of synesthesia, based on the works you looked at, especially since synesthesia was only mentioned once or twice?

    Looking forward to next week! :)

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