The Research Process

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The Research Process

• An Introduction

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Remember the writing process?
Its recursive
Plan Get ideas Draft Get them on
paper Revise Make them better Publish Share with
others
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Research can be Billy trail
Goal
Billys path
Family Circus
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Kuhlthaus Model of Research

• Stage
• Initiation
• Selection
• Exploration
• Formulation
• Collection
• Presentation

Task what do I do? whats my
topic? whats out there? what do I think? what
will I use? how will I sharewhat I learn?
Feelings uncertainty optimism confusion clarity
confidence satisfaction (or not)
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Research They Say I Say
They Say Professional Literature
I sayThesis
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Research Conversation
A research paper is a record of intelligent
reading in several sources on a particular
subject.

• Which is best?
• Can these ideas be combined?
• Why do things happen this way?
• How could thingsbe made better?

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Who cares what they know?

• In academic writing, your opinion is only as good
  as your evidence.

Personal Experience Community of Experts
Parents Home movies show no autism symptoms before vaccination

Doctors detected signs of autism in the movies.
Schwetter These dinosaur bones smell.
Huh? DNA was recovered.
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Who cares what they know?

• In academic writing, your opinion is only as good
  as your evidence.

Advantages of Personal Opinion
Limits of Personal Opinion
Anecdotal evidence is not enough.
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Why read what they know?

• Youll be up-to-date.

Ninety percent of what we know about Alzheimers
has been discovered in the last 15 years. (A.
Riesenberg, as cited in Health Questions, 2007)
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Why read what they know?

• Youll have a complete picture.

An estimated 5 to 15 percent of people with
anorexia or bulimia are male. (National
Institutes of Mental Health, 2007)
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Why read what they know?

• You may be surprised.

Does Prison Harden Inmates? Chen and Shapiros
2003 findings cast grave doubt on at least one
model of deterrence, which holds that a few years
of grim prison conditions will spook criminals
back onto the straight and narrow. Whatever the
deterrent effects of hard prison conditions, the
authors conclude, they may often be outweighted
by the increased criminal propensities of the
prisoners subject to them (p. 33).
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Why read what they know?

• You need to be well-informed to be credible.

Lancaster, England,is arguably the capital of
survivor studies. This is where John Leach
teaches and writes papers cited in almost every
important study of survival (Sherwood, 2009, p.
45)
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How do you find experts?

• They cite sources.

• They are cited as sources.

• They are described as
• experts
• pioneers
• founder of the field of.

• Their writings are found in the scholarly
  literature
• EBSCO
• Scholar Google
• FindArticles.com

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Can you trust Paula Begoun?

• Check out www.cosmeticscop.com
• What are her sources?
• Two ingredients almost universally added to
  cosmetics, fragrance and preservatives are often
  thought to be the major culprits when our skin
  has an allergic or sensitizing reaction to a
  cosmetic (Source Contact Dermatitis, June 1999,
  pages 310315).

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Who is Hans Selye?
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Credibility Quality sources

• Professional literature
• Peer-reviewed journals
• Professional associations
• Respected sources
• Harvard Business Review
• National Institutes of Health
• Expert opinion
• Professional training
• Reputation
• Seminal thinkers
• H. Gardnermultiple intelligences
• M. Seligmanhappiness, learned helplessness
• J. M. Burnsleadership
• Goslinganimal psychologoy

Alpha roosters GroopmanHow Doctors Think (2007)
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Popular or scholarly?

• GoogleStaley pertype
• Go to Is It a Magazine or a Journal?www.milliki
  n.edu/staley/research/pertype.asp

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Conversation Assignments
Explore professional literature. Form a tentative
thesis. Find evidence to support your
thesis. Refine your thesis. Write your paper.
THEYSAY
ISAY
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Other sites to check out

• Save the Pacific Tree Octopuszapatopi.net/treeoct
  opus.html
• Primate Programmingwww.newtechusa.com/ppi/main.as
  p
• British Stick Insect Foundationhttp//www.brookvi
  ew.karoo.net/Stick_Insects/
• Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Divisionhttp//www.d
  hmo.org/
• Museum of Hoaxeswww.museumofhoaxes.com/hoaxsites.
  html
• Snopes.comwww.snopes.com

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I say

• Those who attend class 95 of the time are
  significantly more likely to earn an A or B
  grade.

Any bias there?
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They say

• A study by Snell and Meikes (1995), found that
  those who attended class 95 of the time were
  significantly more likely to earn an A or B
  grade.

• Snell, J., Meikes, S. (1995). Student
  attendance and academic achievement A
  research note. Journal of Instructional
  Psychology 22(2). Retrieved April 12, 2004, from
  Academic Search Elite database.

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I say CSI

• Real-life crimes are solved using blood spatter
  and lots of other reliable forensic
  evidence,just like the ones on CSI.

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They say CSI

• Joseph Peterson, acting director of the Dept. of
  Criminal Justice at the University of
  Illinois-Chicago, says DNA is rarely culled from
  crime scenes and analyzed.
• Crime scenes today are much like they were in the
  1970s, Peterson says, when his studies found that
  fingerprints and tool marks were the most common
  types of evidence left at crime scenes.
• Blood was found only 5 percent of the time,
  usually at murder scenes.
  (Roane,
  2005)

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Conversation CSI effect
Prosecutors Say Juries expecttoo much evidence
Defenders Say Juries understandour case better
I sayThesis
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Conversation What can I add?

• Answer a question
• Do shows like CSI affect the way jurors react
  to evidence?
• Is the CSI effect good or bad?
• Is the CSI effect real?
• What is the best treatment for ADHD?
• Sort out conflicting opinions
• Suggest a new approach
• Update information

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Research can be Billy trail
Goal
Billys path
Family Circus
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A research flowchart
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Then theres serendipity

• Look up schedule for Criminal Minds.
• Find profiler quiz.http//www.cbs.com/primetime/
  criminal_minds/games.shtml
• Wonder can profilers be as fast and accurate as
  Gideons team?
• Do some reading.
• Stumble over CSI effect.

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How do I get started?

1. Find a topic.
2. Read about it.
3. AskCan I find enough information?Will this
   hold my interest?
4. Explore other topics.
5. Choose the best.

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Whats the best topic?

• Arguable
• Discussable
• Adds something to the conversation

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Whats a starting place?
http//word-crafter.net/CompI/ TopicExploration.ht
ml
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Conversation Ideas from Ideas

• Michael Karin discovered a link between
  inflammation and cancer.
• This result, Karin notes, may explain the
  puzzling observation that cutting into
  tumorssometimes seems to encourage metastasis.
• If he is correct, the inflammation generated by
  the surgery could be at fault.
• Findings by other researchers suggest that
  inflammation does play a role in cancer.
• (G. Stix, A Malignant Flame, 2002, p. 65)

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Credibility Top rooster

• Although one should not necessarily judge an
  article by where it appears, there is a pecking
  order in clinical medicine. The New England
  Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the
  American Medical Association (JAMA) are the
  alpha roosters

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Credibility Top rooster

• In my own specialties, the Annals of Internal
  Medicine, Blood, and the Journal of Clinical
  Oncology are the most prestigious. When
  researchers have rigorous, ground-breaking data
  to announce, they try to publish in one of the
  top-tier journals by the same token, these
  journals seek out epochal reports to add to
  their luster (Groopman, 2007, p. 215).

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Know seminal authors

• Anderson and Mather (1993) documented
  personality in octopuses
• Same species, but
• Achillesaggressive
• Emily Dickinsonshy
• Lucretia McEviltore tank apart
• Led to new field animal psychology

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Know key authors animal psych

• Previously, scientists wanted to avoid
  anthropomorphism
• Gosling reframed question

Behaviorists said,Let's get rid of the
fuzzy, sentimentaldescriptions. And they did.
They went to great efforts to recordthings like
how many times a chimpanzee scratched its
head.If I need to know whether I can go into
that cage to clean it, it's not useful to tell
me the chimp scratched its nose 50,000 times in
a year. Just tell me, Is it aggressive or
not?"