Evaluating Research and Scholarly Writing Skills whilst Aging

Aging: Evaluating Skill Related To Research and Scholarly Writing

Before the completion of the doctoral program, conducting research is essential. It gives the student an understanding of core content and emphasizes the techniques utilized in research. The learnings could then be applied to practical life in relevant industries where the doctorate students would step in the future. This paper aims to evaluate my skills related to research and scholarly writing and identify a skill that needs to be improved. 

Potential Skill That I Would Like To Strengthen For Research

The potential skill I want to strengthen is research, which is time management. Both primary and secondary research take their respective times to complete; however, primary research is more time-consuming. Since I have completed Week 1 tasks and Week 2 readings are used extensively, I have learned that selecting pertinent content online that should be related to the research question is undoubtedly a vital step in research. I was affected by my own time management tactic as I felt secondary research takes extensive time to select suitable articles. Ensuring the articles are not outdated and that they are credible needs a critical eye, which certainly requires.

Reading the whole article is not possible sometimes since scholarly sources are lengthy. I tended to read abstracts, summaries, and conclusions sometimes, which I felt might not be sufficient to decide whether I should select the study for inclusion in my paper. Week 2 readings about awareness, risk perception of dementia for aged people, self-compassion, coping strategies, stress management while suffering from the disease, etc., needed a strong decision from my side. It required effective use of digital tools and systematic research techniques to be able to know whether I should add the article to my paper or not. Arranging my research in a structured manner took time, which I perceive could be the need for my skill strengthening. 

Time Management

The skillful application of time, where the use of resources is made for finishing the project, is the skill that a researcher must be interested in. Time is divided into quantitative and qualitative categories (Dudovskiy, 2013). Quantitative time is the one that could be divided into hours, minutes, days and weeks, etc., that go into research. Taking an example of Week 2 resources, it took me six hours to gather those sources. Qualitative time is the time spent on the actual task to make it more meaningful. 

Time management for research requires structuring, protecting, and time adaptation skills (Aeon et al., 2021). Needs an intelligent understanding of the researcher to look into whether the selected article fits into my research and how that would add to the logical reasoning and structure of the paper. Protection in time management is when the interference of other available data might be relevant or irrelevant, and the researcher’s outlook on whether they should be omitted to opt for another appropriate source is the same reflection included in time management. Adaptation to time is when a balance is created between the time investment and the time taken for extracting useful sources from the Internet. A researcher needs to avoid investing one hour on a laptop and come up with hardly two articles that are found relevant, useful, or credible. 

After self-evaluating my secondary research conduction for Week 2, I realized that setting goals for the research are also important. It helps in achieving the targets for the final articles that make sense for our research and effectively manage time.

Further, I felt that inclusion and exclusion criteria are imperative in secondary research, especially for time management. These criteria help exclude irrelevant research and require no time investment from the researcher to read the whole article. It saves the researchers from investing extra time in looking for things that might not be relevant to the paper, hence, managing time more efficiently. The credibility of the research is heightened, and the reasoning to base my thoughts on becomes more valid (Snyder, 2019). Concluding with high-quality data in less time is one of the prominent skills of time management that I want to focus on in the future. 

Plans for Using Additional Strategies throughout My Doctoral Program

Researchers have put forward some useful time management strategies that I could use in my research writing, and I plan on strengthening them throughout my doctoral program. First, I must set genuine and achievable goals to help me stick to the entire research process. Not only that, I aim to review my goals every hour or two hours so that I know I am not straying from my targets and not wasting time looking for something that does not apply to my research objectives. 

I must be strict about my time drain and release myself from the interruptions and procrastination that might come with my time management (Chase et al., 2013). The phone calls, messages, and looking on the phone for investing time in social media posts must be avoided. I intend to learn to set my priorities straight so that high-priority work comes first and low-priority tasks do not eat up my time that should have been used otherwise. Postponing also affects my productivity sometimes due to several interruptions that victimize me. I am left with little time to find ten more sources, for example, and then I regret that I should have prioritized them well. I leave the remaining task to the next day, adversely impacting my persistence. Being disciplined and keeping myself motivated despite several distractions is what I aim to fortify myself with in my future research through the doctoral program.