Three Things I Learned Last Week

Over the last week, I have (among dying part of my hair purple, working a lot, and getting sick) been finishing up my research and analyzing my results, so I thought this week I could give my general ideas for the research process and any interesting things I found.

First, the research process is longer than you may expect. You may think that you can read 8-10 pieces of literature, but you will quickly find that to be false. Reading literature for pleasure and for research is very different, and the pace at which you read will differ greatly.

This is what a 100 page book feels like when doing your research.

When reading for research, you have to be much more attentive, because you’re looking for specific ideas and themes. When reading for pleasure, you can easily skip every other word and understand what’s still happening. Just make sure you take into account how much literature you’re really reading so that you don’t have to cut down on a lot, like me. Another reason I struggled was that when you’re doing a content analysis you set up a code, and you think that your code is perfect and it’ll work great. The reality is that your code isn’t great, and once you start reading you begin to realize it. So my suggestion for any content analysis people in the future is to develop your code and then do a test run. Take a very small section from each piece of literature and run your code on it. For me, it was only when I began reading The Jungle that I became positive in what I was doing. Unfortunately, that was my last piece of work. But to account for my new confidence, I went back and redid earlier pieces.

Second, don’t get too caught up on your original hypothesis. One problem that I faced was that I wanted my results to match my initial ideas, which made me more lenient with my code. Something that maybe wasn’t quite industry, may have been counted industry.

       The line between real and fake, isn’t always so clear.

In the end. this screws up your results, and is dishonest (which is why you always have to go back to your earlier results and check them). I found that with more works, there was less attachment to the original hypothesis though, but it would have been more helpful to have this attitude the entire time.

Third, your results may be inconsistent, and that’s ok! There is true happiness is the stars and planets aligning and giving you perfect results. Unfortunately, this will never happen. You will have nearly perfect results, you will have incomprehensible results, you will have inconsistent results. That’s ok.

Actual picture of my results.

You will have happy moments. Like you will find that the results that use the most natural language per page, will also have the highest number of uses of synesthesia. Then you will find that the results that use the most industrial language per page have the least amount of uses of synesthesia and a medium amount. Unfortunately, nothing will be absolutely perfect. Fortunately, where things are not perfect, they are interesting.

Word count: 535