Research Shortcuts

SHORTCUT 30. Become Your Own Expert

SHORTCUT 30 Become Your Own Expert For some questions on your list, it's conceivable that nobody's yet found the answers. You may have to compile your own data. Coauthor Judi ran into that problem when she was researching for her book Stopping Out. She could discover no document that answered the question, "Do medical and law school admission committees penalize students who've stopped out?" and no expert who'd studied it either. So she prepared her own survey of individual experts. She sent the question (in the letter format shown in Shortcut 26) to the chairmen of twenty-eight selected medical school admission committees and nineteen law school admission committees. She received replies from sixty-three percent of the law schools and thirty-eight percent of the medical schools-enough, it turned out, to enable her to make valuable generalizations for readers. On this topic, she became her own best primary resource. Often, papers for science, social science, and education courses are based almost entirely on primary research: a laboratory experiment, a set of field observations, a survey or opinion poll, or a combination of several techniques. These papers must put the author's original research into the perspective of what's gone before, so do remember to research that data before you begin your own investigation. Unless you've had some good courses in statistical methods , your idea of a survey and your professor's may be miles apart. He may expect you to be familiar with such 87 Copyrighted Material 88 RESEARCH SHORTCUTS terms as chi square, null hypothesis, matrix, and confidence level. If they sound like Greek to you, the best course is to discuss your projected survey with the instructor. An informal survey, carefully labeled just that, may be the best way to fill a blank spot in your paper. Copyrighted Material ...