Blog post 6

 After reading “11 Common Questions About Qualitative Research,” I started to really grasp what qualitative research feels like. The authors talk about qualitative research as a way of understanding people, rather than trying to prove a point or find numbers. I found this to be fascinating. There's such a big stigma that research is only about numbers, but there are some things that numbers just can’t explain.

I started to feel really connected to qualitative research when the article quoted, “A researcher’s goal is to better understand human behavior and experiences.” Part of the article talked about  interviews, focus groups, and observations really caught my attention because it showed how personal and human this kind of research can be. I loved feeling as though there is a place for emotions in research. 

Something that really stood out to me was the quote, “Acknowledge that no matter how much you try, you cannot divorce your research and writing from your past experiences.” I think this does a great job of explaining how biases happen and are simply a part of our lives, and how they can affect our research. Because I want to do my research in a field that I currently work in, I already have a lot of biases about how admissions and hiring function. This was a great reminder that those biases are going to show up in my research and will naturally affect how I view and interpret certain things.

I feel like a big takeaway from this reading is that there’s an empathetic component to research. Funny enough, what I want to do is prove that there’s an empathetic part of the college admissions process. Part of what I want to show is that people reviewing applications have hearts and take a holistic approach, considering the experiences of students. That’s why interviewing and qualitative research are sparking such an interest in me.