From the beginning of my college career, I heard that research experience was important for undergraduates, as it would give us vital practical knowledge and teach us more about our field. As such, when I learned of a research opportunity my sophomore year, I jumped on it. I, along with several other students, entered data from stacks of paper questionnaires into the computer. The data was from parents at an early learning center and the hope was that it would give us insight into the values held by parents of preschoolers and how they had changed over the fourteen years worth of questionnaires on hand. The result was a massive data set. 

 

After the data had been entered, the supervisor asked for volunteers to help her complete the research. I was the only one who chose to continue with the project. She and I worked closely over the next two years, endeavoring to meet twice a week to ensure the research continued to move forward. Our partnership went through several stages over those years. The first task I was given was checking the data set for human error and making sure the questionnaires we had were stored and analyzed in such a way that confidentiality would not be breached.

 

When we felt confident that the data set was properly prepared, we began writing the article for publication. This required me to conduct a literature review so we could understand past research and know which topics might be best to focus on as we prepared to tackle our humongous set of data. Because our research was largely exploratory, the literature review process was long and time consuming. 

 

After finding a large bank of articles, we decided which parts of the data set would be most beneficial to the literature as a whole. Specifically, we decided to look at parent expectations and values using two of our measures and how they changed based on three demographics: mother vs. fathers, male children vs. female children, and Asian-American parents vs. European-American parents. We also looked at the evolution of these expectations over time. During this part of the process, I was able to familiarize myself with SPSS as well as begin to understand more complex statistical measures, such as creating latent variables. I also was able to write and edit several sections of our research article. The hope is that these findings will give us a better understanding of parenting goals today and help preschools better understand parent mindsets. 

 

Finally, I presented a poster of our findings at the This is Research symposium. I have included it above so you can learn more about our research and findings. In the future, we plan to submit our article for publication. Hopefully, other researchers will be able to expand this preliminary research so we can compare our results to that of other demographics.  

 

Working with research has been rewarding for me in so many ways. I am proud to have contributed to my field. I have also learned valuable lessons about teamwork, the processes of research, and how to present findings in an academic setting. I believe that this experience has matured me as a student and will make me an asset to research in the future.