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Research Essentials Week 3 at Pierce College with Professor Kathy Swart
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Research Essentials Week 3 Notes
Research doesn't feel good at first - and that's okay
Research is a process. Like writing, it is also a circular process–not a straight line. It is part trial and error, part happy accident, and part persistence. It should feel messy and awkward at first. That's actually a sign you're on the right track!
Information science researcher Carol Kulthau charted the emotional stages of the research process to prove that successful research does not "feel good", especially in the beginning.
Research should begin with questions.
Maybe you have ideas now about your problem and some potential solutions. If so, great! But before you jump into finding information on your problem, it will save you time to come up with research questions.
Research questions are useful because open-ended and can encourage you to explore your problem or topic. We encourage you to explore with an open mind so that you use what you read to inform you–instead of beginning with an idea and searching for sources that agree with you. (Very little learning can happen that way.)
Since books are longer, they are useful when you want a source that provides lots of background context for a problem or issue. Articles from the web or from magazines and newspapers are excellent for analysis that is very focused on a single event or phenomenon, but they don't usually provide as much lengthy, in-depth context as books do. If we think of information as a timeline, books take the longest to publish, they can contain more in-depth analysis compared with periodical articles or web articles, which are published faster and are shorter in length.
No! It's good to read the whole book if you have time and are interested, but it's very common when doing research to only read a chapter, or even a section of a chapter, to answer a specific research sub-question. Just be sure to read enough that you understand the information in the context that the author intended.