Throughout my studies in psychology at Harding University, I have learned a lot about certain theories and approaches, how they came to be, research methods used, statistical analyses, physiological-related things and ultimately how to conduct my own psychological research. Going into my Advanced Research course, I was terrified about the outcome and how I would make it through this terrifying project everyone was talking about. I already don’t handle pressure very well, so this project really freaked me out.
Professor of Psychology Dr. Ken Hobby explained things to us when we still had to do quite a bit of searching for ourselves to get started. We came up with our topics, our theses, and presented them to the class in order to get feedback on how difficult our project would be and what kind of statistical analysis we would be using. My thesis turned out to be “The Effect of Respondent Gender and Content of Instruction on Test Performance and Stress.” From there, we sort of all went our separate ways. We researched literature related to our topics, came up with our experiments and our surveys, found our many participants, and distributed them in order to collect our data.
For me, the most stressful part of the paper was coming up with enough articles, and being able to write up my review of related literature in the APA approved style. Everything must be very detailed and thorough, and some things in the related literature must be covered. It was also hard interpreting the results, but I got by with a little help from my friends.
Also, finding enough classes to allow us to distribute our surveys was pretty difficult for me because it was close to the Thanksgiving holiday, and I was ready to get out of school. I remember waiting at the front of the classroom while they all took my 15-to 20-minute-long survey — yes, 15 to 20 minutes. I remember glancing over at them as they wrote down their answers. Some were groaning, falling asleep or rolling their eyes. I understood completely, but as an experimenter I needed that information. So, I’m sending out a big thanks to all those who endured my survey. It was very much appreciated.
All the psychology majors that were in advanced research stuck together through the many hours spent in the Ezell lab. We put data into the SPSS data analysis software, tallied up our results and correlations, and interpreted everything. We all backed each other up, helping each other understand what everything meant, and how it all was relevant to our study. I’m thankful for those bonds that have been made throughout the past few years.
After all of the late nights, the stress headaches, the constant lingering and haunting thoughts of that almost 30-page paper looming in the back of my mind, I stand today with a finished Advanced Research paper. Not just a paper filled with reviews of others’ research, but a full explanation of my very own research.
I was pushed and challenged to work hard, to put in the extra hours that made my paper worthy of submitting for graduate school applications. It gave me experience and prepared me for later when the projects will be much harder. At the time I was stressed, but now I see it was worth it. I learned a lot, and I am proud that we all got through it. We did the best we could do, and succeeded.
