This week we are looking at a sampling of our professor’s publications. Since this is going online, I don’t know if I want to put anything public about what I think about them :). Actually, I did enjoy reading all of them, even though they did not all fall in my main areas of interest. I noticed that some were very quantitative, one was qualitative, and the other was more of a meta-analysis.

I’m not against numbers and statistics, but when all of the information in a study gets broken down into pure numbers, I often feel like I am missing something. It is just hard to know what factors are behind those numbers. I think that is why I lean more towards a qualitative paradigm. I don’t mind breaking down research responses into categories and codes to see where the numbers fall, but I still want to know what is behind those numbers.

Another thing I want to do with my future research is to hire a good editor! I am not a good editor, but I can see in all of them typos that I would want to catch before publication. I know that is impossible – I worked for a publishing company that had 4 English majors reading everything before it went out and all of them still missed stuff. So I guess I shouldn’t worry too much about it – maybe in the future it will all be digital and we can just send out edits to update all documents in a flash.