A Collaborative Attempt
In this class, we have worked together to create a collaborative research paper about the Austin Texas Police department’s media literacy training. We are currently in the process of writing it and have six days left before the final product is due to be completed. I have finished my assigned portion and am on hand for any last minute assistance I may be able to offer. At this phase of the project I can honestly say that it is still a really big mess and incoherent as we work through the final stages of collaboration. At the moment, we have finished the outline and the introduction and two team members plan on working through most of the literature review which currently occupies almost four pages, methods and coding sections as well as ensuring consistency throughout the paper with citations and the use of “we.” The context of the intervention is half way done, that being the why part only being written. The training process has been successfully copied into the paper and the methods sections has begun to take shape and are close to being complete. The findings section and the discussion section are both also beginning to take shape a lot more than I thought they had when I began writing this reflection. I am honestly impressed with how well this project is coming along, you don’t notice it happening when you all have smaller parts to play but the paper is beginning to look like a full fledged research paper.
The biggest challenges for us as a group have been tied to working in teams and working through the findings section. Both the pretest coding group and the post-test coding group struggled with team members not completing their portion of the work by the predetermined deadline. Some members of the project are still struggling with communicating. This has made it extremely difficult and frustrating to work together and actually make progress on this project. The findings section has proven to be an extremely challenging part of this project. As communications majors, we have a tendency to avoid math. I personally experience deep hatred and confusion when math is involved, and without being taught how to interpret the data, we have struggled to make sense of the tables. In an effort to avoid the terrible evil that is understanding math, when given the option I chose to work in the bar graph depicting where police trainers found their training videos and working on making the rationale more coherent. I then decided to be the person who turned the rationale into the introduction as I already knew what the rationale said and the work needed to transform it. I originally struggled with summarizing the findings of the bar graph because the words were cut off and at the time I didn’t have access to the numerical data and thus estimated the findings. I then asked professor Hobbs for the complete data and was given the screenshot of the results. Professor Hobbs will input the answers to the “other” section for me. Professor Hobbs has also offered to handle the findings for the complicated charts, which we as a class were all very happy about.
As I have already summarized my experience with coding, I will be repurposing that summary in this reflection. I believe this summary is a great reflection of what it has been like working on this project for me as I detail the step-by-step process of the coding. For this part of the project, I was assigned to the pre-test team. We were instructed to code the data provided by Austin Police Department trainers separately and then come together and devise a “coding memo” based on what we decided to rank each answer. For my individual coding, I color coded the words to represent great in blue, good in green, okay in pink, poor in red and bad/did not answer in normal black and white. I will admit my original coding evolved as I moved down the list without my realizing it until Julia and I came together to talk through our ranking. Originally, I had marked great answers as those which included the name of the poster, mentioned it as being some sort of ad or gym membership, and seemed to, in my opinion, have a general idea of what they were looking at. I had marked good answers as those which seemed to know roughly what was going on but were not awesome, on the nose answers. I had marked okay answers as answers which I felt were coming close to understanding what was happening in the post but were just slightly off. I had marked poor answers as answers that were completely and terribly wrong. These answers illustrated that the participant was overly biased or didn’t have a clue what was actually going on and thus were given a two. Finally, bad was reserved for people who admitted not knowing or didn’t respond. Input from my group member Julia was vital to understanding what made a good or bad answer, and it made it less boring having someone to talk about the project with. She helped me realize just how inconsistent I was with my answers which is important in a project like this one.
After our individual work, Julia, Iqbal, and I met up in the coffee shop where Julia and I created the coding memo by comparing and contrasting our ranking. Ultimately, in comparing answers I realized how inaccurate my answers were and how neither one of us were able to adequately grade them on our own, at least not to a professional standard. Together, Julia and I were able to create a logical set of rules for coding the data. Later that day, we had class with Professor Hobbs. In her class, professor Hobbs went over the coding done by each member of both groups and then her expert analysis of the questions. We were then given a three point system and told to code all of the first question by giving one point for each portion of the answer. We then met up via Zoom a few days later to use Professor Hobbs expert analysis and create the point rubric for the rest of the questions. My group and I inserted a “0” for any question that did not have any of the qualifications. I will be linking both my group’s original coding memo as well as our rubric based on the expert analysis provided by Professor Hobbs below. I believe this coding method provided better results than the original one we had used.
I have learned a lot about the process of writing a research paper, and the process of working together. At the beginning of this project, it seemed a lot scarier than it is now that we are almost done, hell it felt a lot scarier a week ago then it does right now. When the paper is broken down into pieces and tackled together, it is a much better project than if we were to have done it alone. Although, there might have been a lot less confusion and disorganization but I believe it has helped us all grow as people to have to work with one another to make this project come to life. I look forward to seeing the final product and will offer extra help on anything that needs finishing when I go to class tomorrow.
I am honestly awed by the teamwork and collaboration shown by most of my classmates, both in our Tuesday meeting and Sunday afternoon/evening while we worked on putting the final touches on this project. We were able to get ourselves organized, discuss what needed to be done, and assign ourselves to each task at hand. I am so amazed seeing this messy mix-matched rambling document which felt like multiple different additions and writing styles mashed together, take the form of a real research paper. We have been able to discuss each step of the project and work together to ensure pieces sound universal and make sense. In the moments where the class worked well together and almost everyone participated and did their portion of the project, it was honestly fun to be working together. This class actually felt like a team for this assignment and it was easy to face and eliminate confusion and uncertainty by simply asking the group. I am honestly very proud of the work we have done together on this project, we have managed to navigate all the confusing aspects of it together and like a real research team.
Beanie Carr
