Reflection on Research
While researching the studies that have been done on nurse logs, I came to a point where I realized I had lost sight of the scope of the this project. I diligently searched through the vast scientific databases available to UO students online, and at one point had upwards of twenty-two different articles saved. Through the process of narrowing down which of Buster Simpson’s projects I was going to focus on, I also narrowed that list of scientific articles considerably. Three of those articles, however, turned out to be Ph. D. theses and my better instincts kicked in. I chose not to use these sources in my project due to their overwhelming length and dense subject matter, much of which went over my head. Instead, I narrowed down my pool of articles yet again, and printed them out in order to take written notes on them.
Even here, my desire to delve deeper into the subject than time permitted got the best of me. One of the articles I had selected and printed turned out upon further review to be only distantly related to the science I was studying.
Notice the title and the lack of relation to any mention of nurse logs. Part of the article included mentions of tree decay, a topic related to the broader study of nurse logs, but ultimately not a focus of my project.
This process of failure taught me some important research skills that will undoubtably aid me in my college career. Namely: take time to consider the scope of what the research project requires, and to suppress my own insatiable desire to have complete knowledge about a subject before discussing it. In reality, this later desire is very often not feasible.
This realization ties in in an interesting way to the BBC article Viewpoint: How creativity is helped by failure . The article recounts the story of a ceramics teacher who divided his students into two groups – one that was to graded upon quantity of pots produced and the other upon quality. With this particular temptation, that is, to consider a topic more than is necessary, I found that my quandary was the same as the later group. By the end of the class, they had spent more time theorizing than producing.
Since this failure, I have spent some time doing quick free writes on how the different concepts I have been studying relate to one another. This practice eventually lead to the flow chart included in one of my previous journal posts.