The Challenging Journey of Research
Our research process has just begun, so I think it is too early to give my final point of view on it. But so far, I have certainly enjoyed exploring my skills in secondary research.
For my first secondary research, I chose to simply investigate online the major negative impacts of climate change and came across an article on water flooding in the most affected countries. The truth is that I had never been interested in that particular topic, I was aware of climate change and its disadvantages, but I had not researched any specific disadvantages, so it was quite interesting. Then on my first day of class, I met my team and after talking about the different researches, we decided to choose a topic that is strongly related to the wonderful country where we are living now, Portugal. This step wasn’t too complicated for us.
That’s how we decided to research the impact of climate change on agriculture in Portugal. Then, as I personally do not have much previous knowledge, for my second secondary research I decided to dig deeper into the topic, then I searched for various articles and position myself better. I found a lot of information and it was overwhelming. I did not know where to start or how to get the best information out of those sources. Also, to be honest, I am not a natural reader because I get distracted easily and it takes a lot of effort to read long and many articles. Up to now, the research has been based on virtual platforms, accessing archives, searching for relevant books and articles through search engines such as Google Scholar and the online platform of the Nova SBE library. They may not be the best options, but I like to have the flexibility of being able to do it from home or wherever I am.
In the last two weeks, I have learned that for the process of research the most important thing is to choose topics that we are genuinely interested in and passionate about, as the procedure will not always be easy. There will be moments of discouragement, where we will face challenges such as language barriers and cultural differences. For instance, my team and I are conducting research on the impact of climate change on agriculture specifically in Portugal. This led us to develop hypotheses, and in order to test them, we have to conduct interviews with farmers in the country. However, we are not sure if these people are able to communicate in English, so our group will present a possible language barrier and potentially a cultural barrier as well.
My research journey, still ongoing, has been short, but it has also been equal parts satisfying and enlightening. I am very much looking forward to seeing where the rest of this process takes me.
