Research Skills

If you haven’t filled in a questionnaire before you must live under a rock. If you haven’t ever constructed a questionnaire before please proceed with caution. Questionnaires are of course valid research instruments but the have their own ethical considerations and logistical problems. Poorly constructed questionnaires are frustrating to the…

In the previous post, Prof Partout suggested that the apparent dead ends we meet in our research are not real. He does admit, however, that they sure do feel that way. …

The year is 2022 and news is all over the place. One click is all it takes to unlock everything you need to know about the latest piece of hot goss that’s going on half the globe away from you. Much like a few decades ago when people just discovered…

Time is a slippery fish. Sometimes we feel like we have all the time in the world and at others we feel we never have enough. Prof Partout thinks this is especially so for research students. The allotted years of a PhD may seem long at the beginning but suddenly…

This is the eighth post in a 31-day series, intended to one day be included in a book, Letters to My Son. These are letters to my 27-year-old son, Eric, whom I placed with his other family through the Spence-Chapin Adoption Agency immediately following his birth in 1995. 8 August…

Outline After you finish conducting your research on whatever you are researching you now need to put it together in an outline. This outline will help you write your rough draft which we will cover later. For now, let’s focus on how we put an outline together. Writing an Outline …

We have already covered how to use a dictionary and an encyclopedia but if you need a refresher go to these links: How to Use a Dictionary https://empayton.medium.com/research-skills-how-to-use-a-dictionary-57dfb2fe97ae How to Use an Encyclopedia https://empayton.medium.com/research-skills-how-to-use-an-encyclopedia-3295f90e2da3 Now, let’s cover other basic research skills. Thesaurus A thesaurus is almost like a dictionary. However…

Analyzing Sources Sources can be articles in books and/or magazines, books themselves, and online articles. For the sake of ease let’s call one of these sources a research report. Research reports are reports that give information about a certain topic. Research reports have a title, introduction, body paragraph(s), and a…

Reading for Information There are two ways of reading for information. These ways are called skimming and scanning. Skimming is when you look at a source in order to note the general subject, the major headings, and specific sections. Scanning is looking quickly at a source and searching for key…