Category: Reflection #1

When trying to figure out why young adults are not fully on board with community engagement in the modern day, many people do not factor in the idea that location is everything. Our modern society is littered with external stimuli and stressors for people to encounter, so much to the point where many people are not concerned with issues that do not directly impact their day-to-day lives. Going into my research on young adult engagement, I want to focus on issues that directly impact people based on the specific region where the problem is occurring. For this, I plan on visiting and researching local sites that work towards fixing community problems in certain regions. However, there are several variables that I will need to factor in before I work towards implementing my plan with Heartlands. 

As with any research project, there are a few data points that I will need to gather during the implementation process. First off, I need to assess what specific problem each site is working to mitigate. Since I plan on using region specific causes to convince young adults to be more active in their communities, having a clear idea of the main issue at hand will be crucial for my plans going forward. After that, I will need to find out what communities are primarily affected by this problem. Promoting an organization that is attempting to solve an issue in one or more specified regions is the best plan for engaging people in those communities. Also, I must find out what the average adult can do to contribute to the cause. This last piece of information will be the key to convincing young adults to support these organizations. If young people are given a task to complete that is both transparent and beneficial to their community, they will be more likely to follow through with it. Unfortunately, there are multiple obstacles that could hinder me from findings these exact data points. For instance, many of the problems being worked on at these local sites may not be specific to a certain region. Some of these issues may be shared between multiple cities, with their severity varying between each region. This could make it difficult to give people a problem that directly impacts their lives. Along with that, many of these sites may not offer an exact mission statement besides donating to local causes, which not every young adult is in the best position to do. Another issue in the implementation process is coordinating these plans with the community organization I am working with. 

During the course of my research, I will be partnering with Heartlands Conservancy to carry out my plans. The majority of Heartland’s role in my research project will be giving me advice on local sites to visit and what to look out for. While I do not believe there will be any conflicts on ideas for research, I will still need to ensure that my plans align with theirs. The sites that I will visit and the causes that I will support will have to relate to agriculture and the use of water behind it. The agriculture aspect could be a limiting factor, but I believe I will still find enough sites that also fight for those same causes. In the end, my community partners seem excited for my plans, so I know that I will have their support throughout this research process whenever I need it. 

Conducting research, whether in the lab or out in the field, is not something that you can just dive right into. The complexity of experiments and all their variables is one factor that makes preparation a necessity in research studies. Add in ethics and the rules, and it makes sense how not just anybody could become a researcher. Many people starting off have no idea what criteria should be met. Thankfully many researchers have made different acronyms or memorable phrases to help ensure new researchers know what to look for in their early plans. One of them being EMRN: Engagement, Mechanics, Reasoning, and Novelty. 

Novelty, in this context, means coming up with an authentic plan that looks for deeper meanings in events. A great research study must come from an idea that is unique and significant to the subject matter. Conducting an experiment based on old ideas or unpopular ideas will not give people any reason to look at the results. This is most likely why many researchers would prefer to conduct fieldwork over lab experiments. Discoveries made on human patterns or interactions cannot always be found in a laboratory. Going out and talking to people is the best way to conduct a groundbreaking study. 

For the Mechanics part of the EMRN criteria, a researcher must make sure their plan is understandable and without fault. However, these “faults” can be from many different causes. For example, one of the biggest changes to research in the 21^st century is implementing rules for ethics.  Which is good for not only the participants of research studies, but the researchers as well, since mistreating volunteers in a study could lead to a shift in the results. But what about the other people who are a part of the study, such as the testers? They are not mentioned a lot, but what if they did not have ethics protection? Those same errors from the participants could still happen with the testers. This is why researchers need to be thorough in looking for “faults” in their studies, because they could easily come from an unsuspected source. 

Doing research for the first time is not easy. There will be challenges the person must overcome. But there are always resources to help early researchers. I know this from personal experience, I am soon to be conducting research for the first time too. Luckily, I know exactly where to go if I get lost.