Assignment 1: Experiencing Research Report and Reflection Actions
You have been asked to organize for yourself a practical research experience. There are 3 clear ways you could do this:
Immerse yourself in a research experience by participating in a research project being run at the University of Stirling as a research participant e.g. participation in staff or PhD or MSc student research project.
Engage with a researcher – interview them about one specific research project they are engaged in. Ideally this will be a post-doctoral research fellow, a research assistant or a PhD or MSc student rather than a staff member.
Engage with a stakeholder about research – identify a stakeholder, this may be the coach of a club you are a member of, or your workplace manager (sports/health-related), or employee of a charity (sports/health-related), or member of NHS or social care staff and interview them about what would be an important research question to answer in their workplace (related to Sports Studies/Health) and how this might be conducted as a project – you are looking for their ideas.
Given Covid-19 making it difficult to participate in face to face research, if you have participated in a research project in the past year and can remember enough about it to be able to write in the level of detail in the notes below, then writing about this past experience will also be acceptable.
You will need to take notes after the research participation or during the interview to help with your write up. These should be descriptive and also your own reflections.
Assessment: The report should be no more than 1000 words and include two sections:
Part 1: Descriptive Report describing the research experience. A concise descriptive report of the research undertaken/discussed (about 2/3 of the report).
Part 2: A brief reflective report about your experience/what you have learned about research from this (about 1/3 of your report).
Notes to help you:
Adopt a structure that is logical and uses appropriate headings;
The style of writing and presentation should be clear and logical;
Write a descriptive section that clearly describes the research project engaged in or interviewed about. You should consider these questions:
What is the background research area?
What is the research question?
What is the methodology – quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods?
Who are the participants and why were they chosen?
What exact methods are being used and why?
What is the procedure of the research i.e. what did they do/talk about doing
How would they go about analyzing the data?
Write a reflective section on your experience of the process and what you have learned about research through this experience relative to the research process. You should consider these questions:
Did you enjoy the experience?
What specific topic did you learn more about?
What specific research methods did you learn more about?
Which part of the research process do you think you learnt the most about?
How is this experience going to influence your development as a researcher and your future research project?
