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Blog #5

 a) What have you learned about the processes of designing a sound research study in class? We discussed several ideas and elements of conducting a research study in class. Learning about the different methods by which you can conduct a research study such as focus groups, surveys, usability tests, analyzing documents, and more, has helped me to better understand that there is more than just one way to conduct a research study. I think that it is interesting how many different ways you can actually conduct a research study. Being able to pick from a range of different methods, and customize a research study to fit the element that you want to research is a skill that can be used to learn more about almost anything. Whether a research study is done on a small or large scale, I think it is important to do it carefully and correctly. Doing the CITES training online as well as the lectures in class have really helped me to understand how to conduct a research study in the correct way....
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Blog Post #4 on plans for revision, etc. and Peer Response

In my outline, I carefully made a plan of what I could do if I were to perform this research. I think that my ideas for how I would perform the research are pretty solid and I do not plan on changing that. Jay was my peer reviewer on my outline. He commented that he would reccomend I specify that each sample group in my research would have a 30 + size. This advice was very helpful and I plan to be more specific with that in my final report. He also added that too small a sample size would make it easy to link demographic to the results of my research. This could setback my research because it could potentially invalidate it. I definitely agree with this and I plan on making these revisions to my final draft.
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Blog Post #3 on research gap

 When writing my literature review about climate change science communication to the public, I found that there is a research gap in studying the use of "trigger words" in communicating climate science. I was able to find a PTW journal discussing the use of different trigger words in governmental documents. Some examples of trigger words when it comes to talking about climate change can be the words, "climate change", "global warming", "fossil fuels", and many more. These words can make some sociopolitical groups feel like they are being left out of the conversation on climate change. They can also make some sociopolitical groups completely disregard the importance of the information being presented in front of them. This research gap is an important topic to look at in more depth for several reasons. The main reason being that making a wide variety of groups feel included in the conversation about climate change is a key part of affectively comm...
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Blog Post #2 on research topic/issue with tentative 10 sources and Peer Response

The topic that I have landed on is The Communication of Scientific Findings Related to Climate Change to the General Public." While looking for sources for my topic, I realized that there are less sources about it than I would have thought. I also noticed that most of the sources I found are from the past 25 years. So it is clearly a newly sprouted topic in the technical communication/communication community. I think that this is a good thing because that means that we are going to start talking about it more and more which I deem definitely necessary. The 10 tentative sources I found cover a variety of different methods of communicating climate change science to the public. Spoel, Philippa, et al. “Public Communication of Climate Change Science: Engaging Citizens Through Apocalyptic Narrative Explanation.”  Technical Communication Quarterly , vol. 18, no. 1, Dec. 2008, pp. 49–81.  EBSCOhost ,  https://doi.org/10.1080/10572250802437382 . Richards, Daniel P., and Erin E. J...
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Topic Interests

 I have a few ideas for some topics that I am interested in at the moment. However, I want to make them more personalized so if anyone has any ideas for me please let me know. The first topic that I think would be interesting to write about is testing how quickly different people from different age groups can locate a specific feature on a certain app or website. I think that would be interesting because I would be able to observe how differently aged people interact with a website or application. The second topic I have is to test the memorability of different highlight colors. I thought I could do this by writing different paragraphs  and highlight different words of the same group. Maybe I could highlight one verb or one adjective in each paragraph and ask the participant to write or type which word they think was highlighted without checking.
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