This week we were instructed to find and report on a research article in
an area of our research interest. The process was time-consuming for me,
primarily in the task of pinpointing an article that I believed would be all
the necessary criteria to complete the task. I spent approximately 90% of
the time just looking for an article that I could report on adequately for a
number of reasons.
One of the main issues I faced was trying to find an experimental
article, rather than a review article or a meta-analysis. A lot of the
research articles present reviewed previous research, which for me,
wouldn't allow me to report on my critiques for research design in a
feasible, satisfactory way considering time constraints, value, and the
overall purpose and outcome of the assignment itself (a weekly discussion
and short paper, versus a thesis or dissertation).
Another issue I faced was trying to find an article of interest that used
methods and analyses that were not overly complicated, as I wpiuld not
be able to report on an article if I could not understand the purpose,
significance, and effecats of the methods used. For example, I first began
my search browsing for child developmental articles involving language
growth and development. Articles used methods such as the chunking
lexical and sublexical sequences in children (CLASSIC) model, which
"implement a chunk-based learning mechanism that learns by gradually
chunking information in the model’s internal representational system on
the basis of incoming input" (Jones & Rowland, 2017, p. 2). The mere
explanation of this model took pages to explain, which did not seem to
clarify the study and research methods, but add confusion and superfluity.
In the end, after investing all that time in the article, the article still did
not clarify what language was used, how the information was collected
(naturalistic observation? experiment? computer program? research
coding?), who collected the information, etc. The article also listed a
messy amount of different analyses used such as multiple regressions,
paired correlations, etc. It also didn't address factors such as reliability,
validity, and a good discussion on limitations and implications of the
study.So many different types of analysis were done with so many
different models that it was hard to keep track of that even when going to
the discussion section of the paper it was hard to understand the
conclusions made because it did too much at once. Studies usually
investigate very specific topics that almost seem hard to generalize
because of their extreme specificity, so this article was extremely messy
and confusing.
Other articles I was interested in seemed promising, as they
investigated topics which clearly defined participants, analyses, discussion
of reliability, and other basic measures, but I was forced to not choose
them because they were not within this course is rubrics requirement of
citing articles within the last 10 years (i.e., Hoff, 2003). Because of all of
this I decided to just search up the most current journal publications for
child development and chose an article from there. I was able to find an
article that had implications for language and development which was
also simple in its design and very clear in its conclusions. The research
article I chose was in an experimental study regarding the effects of
maternal smartphone use on mother–child interactions. The study found
that smartphone usage significantly affects mother-infant interactions,
which may have a plethora of negative effects on child development in
various domains, including language, cognition, and socioemotional
regulation (Lederer et al., 2022).
Finally, regarding Jordan & Zanna (1999), discussion regarding what
to look for in a research article as well as how to understand the template
was not new, as it shouldn't be, being that we read and interpret studies
immediately when we begin undergraduate college (and often sooner
depending on our compulsory K-12 education). One of the most valuable
suggestions made in the article is made repeatedly from a variety of
sources. This recommendation is to focus on the "discussion" section of a
research article as it offers summaries of the entire paper, as well as
offers an "interpretive guide" to the article as a whole.
References
Hoff E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence: socioeconomic
status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech.Child
development,74(5), 1368–1378. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-
8624.00612
Jones, G., & Rowland, C. F. (2017). Diversity not quantity in caregiver
speech: Using computational modeling to isolate the effects of the
quantity and the diversity of the input on vocabulary growth. Cognitive
psychology, 98, 1–21.
Lederer, Y., Artzi, H., & Borodkin, K. (2022). The effects of maternal
smartphone use on mother-child interaction. Child development, 93(2),
556–570. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13715
Jordan, C.H., & Zanna, M.P. (1999). How to Read a Journal Article in Social
Psychology.
