GEOG 2260 Final Post
I have taken several courses throughout high school and university where I learned about quantitative data. Quantitative research is about numbers. And what I found interesting in this course is that qualitative research is often about the opinions, thoughts and feelings of a respondent; to explain people and their relationship to places (Hay, 2016, Chapter 1).
These Three Things I know for certain about human geography research:
One thing I know for certain is how to ensure the rigour of the research process through triangulation. According to Hooykaas (2021), this means that “we are looking at multiply ways of getting to the answer.” Triangulation would be applied to various stages of the research process. It is essential to look at different sources, check your research process and methods, speak to multiple researchers and verify the information you collected. This adds validity to your entire research project.
Another thing I know for certain is the concept of research ethics. The implementation of fundamental ethical principles into one’s research is extremely important. These include, but are not limited to, applying moral rules and codes into collecting and analyzing the research subjects and accepting the person’s right to privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent. Taking the CORE (Course on Research Ethics) Tutorial involving humans taught me a lot about this topic.
One topic I thoroughly enjoyed is the idea of coding. All of us have used a highlighter to identify valuable and important information. Categorizing codes according to a coding framework is not something I have learned before. It is an effective way to organize data. This can be achieved through deductive coding, when you have a set of predefined themes that will be applied, or inductive coding when you are not sure yet how to organize your data and create codes that will cover data in the article.
The things I am still confused by?
While I feel I grasped most of the concepts taught in this course, there are some things I think I could strengthen that would benefit me as a human geographer. One notion that I personally struggled with was critical reflexivity. “Reflexivity,” as defined by Kim England (1994), “is a process of constant, self-conscious scrutiny of the self as a researcher and of the research process” (Hay, pg. 34). Critical reflexivity can be a complex concept to grasp when entering the world of qualitative research. As Hooykaas (2021) stated, the difficulty with it is that I am not used to scrutinizing my own engagement with my work. I understand that it is important that I have an awareness, as a researcher, of how I may be influencing the research process or subject.
Another topic I feel I could’ve done a better job at grasping is grounded theory. This methodology is primarily used in qualitative research and involves forming hypotheses by collecting and analyzing data. I did some outside research to understand the concept and came across the explanation that it is a theory that is grounded in the voices of those studies.
While I have enjoyed coding, I was confused by the concept of cognitive bias and definitional drift in the coding process. Hooykaas (2021) defines that it “occurs when the beginning of the data set is coded differently than the material coded later.” I understand that by coding your data just with words, each researcher’s definition of what that word describes could vary and may not be directly related to what we are actually trying to research.
These three things I know for certain about me as a human geographic researcher
Firstly, I know that I am a more extroverted person and that I work well with other people instead of working by myself. Being in a group brings new and different ideas to the table, allowing for a better discussion of ideas. Working as a group for our presentation made it easier to cover a broader range of topics. Additionally, receiving and giving feedback to our blog post allowed me to relate to the course concept on a deeper level. The interaction of humans and the environment is a multidisciplinary subject matter. According to Hay (2015), “Contemporary human geographers study places, people, bodies, discourses, silenced voices, and fragmented landscapes."
As a human geographer, I will have many real-world situations to apply my knowledge to find out why and how events occur, how human culture interacts with their natural environment, and how locations can impact people. I also know that I am required to develop strong analytical and writing skills. This course has introduced me to many essential basic skills of performing qualitative research, including conducting an interview, collecting qualitative data, and applying research and analytical methods.
As a human researcher, I know that there are many types of qualitative research. Ethnography is an interesting type to me. The interaction and connection on a deeper level with people from other backgrounds and cultures while immersing yourself in their community is highly fascinating to me. In the future, I can apply my knowledge gained in GEOG 2260 and apply it to geographical problems and issues such as how human activity affects the environment and how the environment affects humans. Human Geography is crucial as it draws together many strands to understand the world today.
These Three Areas I need to spend time developing/learning to feel more confident in my skills.
One skill I could spend more time developing is my research skills. For our Digital Storybook Assignment, we were required to include six peer-reviewed journal articles as well as four other sources of information that were trustworthy. This is an area that I need to spend more time on. For the most part, while it is easy to find peer-reviewed journal articles, they are often precise in a topic and are often written using complex language due to the subject matter. The difficulty with other sources of information is trying to assess the credibility of such. Not all sources are reliable, and it is vital for me as the researcher to critically evaluate, make sure the information is current, does the author have credentials and is the website reputable and non-biased.
I need to spend more time developing is my interview skills. Interviews are an excellent method of gaining access to information about events, opinions, and experiences. Opinions and experiences vary enormously among people of different class, ethnicity, age, and sexuality (Hay, 150). It is important to be adequately prepared for the interview. Even though I was able to expand my knowledge on different types of interviewing, it is an area that I can develop further as I progress as a human geographer.
Last but not least, a skill that I need to spend more time developing is to feel more confident when analyzing surveys. There are many different ways data can be presented and various methods to explore it. It is crucial to analyze to form a conclusion based on that analysis properly. Surveys, where the data collected is ordinal, categorical, interval or ratio, can often be analyzed electronically. Surveys with open-ended questions get more complicated to interpret.
Hay, I. (2005). Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Hooykaas, A. (2021). Lecture Notes from GEOG2260- Applied Human Geography.
When going through your post, I found it interesting when you mentioned “I work well with other people instead of working by myself. Being in a group brings new and different ideas to the table.” I could definitely relate to this because of the group that I was in. We did a great job at coming up with our own ideas and forming an overall story from our ideas. We were able to work together to develop a great working experience, where everyone was able to contribute equally and with no problems occurring. By having a group, it became less stressful and created an environment that made the project really fun to create, and I never knew that I would enjoy it as much as I did. I think that having group projects will be extremely beneficial to us moving forward, as it has allowed us to become more comfortable expressing what we would like to communicate in our projects. When everyone works together, it makes a project a lot easier, and creates a form of relief, so that all of the work involved wouldn’t be directly placed on your back.
Communication is a very important aspect of this course, as it directly relates to human geography and how it is able to concern itself with human experiences, environments, and understandings (Hay, 2016). Moving forward, do you think you developed any new communication or collaboration skills with the process of the digital story telling project? You mentioned that you are an extroverted person, so did that help you with the overall experience of the group project?
Let me know. Thanks!
References
Hay, Iain. Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography. 4th ed., Oxford, 2016
