Reflections

AN QI

This was definitely an eye-opening experience for me as it was my first time to carry out a research study. Throughout this journey, I have learnt that how important teamwork and planning were. There were so much details which we need to pay attention to and thought through them during our planning. One important take away from this project is that I have learnt the importance of crafting proper survey questions, which require a lot of thorough thinking behind every question that we came up with where we have to be very specific and precise in every question that we ask and every question we ask has to be link back to our research question. If not, the data that we collected back will be ambiguous and hard to collate. Another skill that I have learnt is literature review where I can apply this skill to my other report writing in future too. Teamwork is definitely one of the key to succession in this project. We split up the work load among us to get things done in a more efficient way. I would also like to thank my teammates Valerie and Joel for doing the data analysis despite data entry on SPSS is such a tedious process and my other teammates Farezah, Prajakta and Javier where we collaborate well through this tough yet fruitful learning experience.

Overall, this module indeed has helped me in preparing myself for the final year project!

Siti Nurfarezah

Through this project, we have encountered many obstacles, however we overcame it together and learnt many meaningful lessons from it.  One of the things I have learnt is the importance of thorough analysis of our questionnaire. Our first survey was quite disorganized and was not well thought out. There were many irrelevant questions that were unnecessary as it did not answer our main research question. We failed to link back the choice of questions to our topic. It is very important to have a clear reason as of why we put every question in our survey, so that it will not waste the respondent’s time and also get meaningless data in the end.    Furthermore, many of our questions were open ended and were not specific. For example, “what type of exercise did you do?” and “how long do you normally exercise for?”  This resulted in a lot variations in answers, making us unsure on how to collect, organize and analyze the data. As such, we had to re-analyze our survey and make an entirely new survey despite our limited time. For our second survey, we ensured that the questions were well thought out and is very specific. Our data results for the second survey were much clearer and easier to organize as compared to the first. Also, another obstacle we faced was that one of the assumptions for Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient was violated, hence we had to use a non-parametric test which is the Spearman’s rank correlation and this was not taught in class. As such, our group members had to research online on how to carry out this test and analyze the data. All in all, I have gained a valuable experience through this project, and carrying out this project successfully would not have been possible without the great teamwork that our group members have.

 Javier Yeo

It is one thing to learn in theory how to design and carry out your research and it really is a whole other matter to actually be designing a study intended for application in the real world. One of my biggest takeaways was regarding questionnaires versus experiments. In the beginning, we were biased against doing an experiment because we were worried we couldn’t commit the time or the resources. We also gravitated towards questionnaires as we’ve also had our fair share of being respondents for our own friends’ surveys and we thought there was beauty in simplicity. Our thoughts were proven wrong of course, as a questionnaire came with its own set of worries. Playing the role of the researcher, I came to realization about my prejudice against questionnaires as a tool of measurement. Even if a questionnaire could adequately measure the variables it is supposed to and SPSS is able to conclude correlations between them, I still felt no sense of control especially over the extraneous variables we identified. I was also not comfortable with respondents giving answers based on their own estimates and “gut feeling”. Although I am left with a negative impression of questionnaires, that is not to say I am not open to learning more on how questionnaires can be constructed to ensure both reliability and validity. Especially for a field of study as abstract as psychology, questionnaires that take into considerations the perceptions and feedback of the respondents definitely still do have its place in designing studies.

Prajakta Parab

This was our first experience planning and executing a research study and it was definitely an interesting journey. We got to learn a lot of things such especially the importance of the simplest of details. Although we encountered certain problems during the experiment, we managed to come together as a group to try and resolve them. Through this journey, I learnt the importance of reviewing literature extensively, as literature can be very informative on whether such a study has been done before and how it has been conducted. Moreover, it is a useful platform for identifying any possible limitations encountered due to the nature of the topic. Another thing I learnt, is the importance of rationalising through every step of the methodology of a project to avoid coming up with a study which does not correspond with the hypotheses and has many loopholes. However, the good part about making mistakes, is getting the opportunity to learn from them as you rectify them and as a group, we managed to overcome our mistakes, through more research, consultations and teamwork. Overall, I think this was an eye-opening experience and a good way to start off our Research endeavour.

Joel Woon

I have learnt a lot from this research assignment. The essential components of a statistical study and how to conduct one. The entire assignment was a learning process. We had first-hand experience of the difficulty faced when constructing a questionnaire from scratch.  We ended up having to redo our entire data collection process because of a flawed questionnaire. Only after a lot of literature reviews were we able to come up with a questionnaire we were happy with and measured what we needed it to measure. We definitely honed our literature review skills.

I also learnt how to use SPSS to aid in the analysis of the raw data we collected. I picked up many important skills that will probably be useful in future studies that I will conduct. I feel that this assignment is very good preparation for the final-year project that we will take on later this year.

I am grateful for my group members who worked tirelessly for this project even though we had to redo our data collection. It was not an easy decision to make, but we unanimously agreed on redoing it. After the decision we all worked even harder to get the project done on time. I am also very thankful for the people who willingly helped us do the survey a second time.

‌Valerie Lim

Firstly, when we discussed about our topic- exercise and self-esteem, I was eager and excited to find out if exercise really do affect self-esteem. I feel that it is an interesting topic to research about and have no regrets choosing it as our project topic. Secondly, although survey was used instead of an experiment in our project, it was not as easy as I thought it would be. Sure, surveys are less tedious and time consuming compared to carrying out an experiment, it still requires much time reading and analysing numerous literature reviews, deciding the type of question to ask such as open-ended or closed-ended, how we want to phrase them or what questions to include and asking questions about our questions. Due to our first survey being not detailed and well thought enough, we ended up with results that were all over the place and unable to categorise and analyze them. This, however, taught me about the importance of sufficient preparation and discussion before designing a survey. The questions ought to all be thought through very thoroughly so as to have a desirable survey. Nonetheless, we worked together as a team and managed to come up with a more refined survey. Doing project work is never a smooth sailing ride, it requires time, good communication skills within group members and hours of hardwork and effort. It is definitely, however, a good learning experience with many valuable lessons learnt that I can apply in the near future.