Question

The topic for the reflexivity essay is your views about the value of research and scholarly thinking and their relationship with society.

It is intended to discuss everything you have learned from the course, your insights, and perspectives about scholarly thinking and all the skills, knowledge and literacies required as you move forward to higher professional and research courses. You are given the freedom to choose the subtopics and aspects of scholarly inquiry to focus on, depending on what you consider most relevant.

More importantly, your reflexivity essay must also explore how you can contribute to research efforts in your chosen field, and how these contributions can be relevant to current society. You can also discuss how scholarly thinking can be applied practically, and how it can enhance or affect life outside the academe.

Some questions which you can ponder upon as you write your essay include:

• What is the relevance of research in human society?
• How can I contribute to the existing body of knowledge in my field?
• How can research be useful in addressing social problems?
• How can academic research be distributed and made accessible and understandable to the common people?

As required in a reflexivity essay, your ideas, insights, and perspectives must be drawn from or accompanied by evidences sourced from researches and other academic, credible materials.

You can organize your reflexivity as one continuous essay, or you can use thematic subheads to divide the points you wish to relate with the topic.

The length of the paper should be around 1,500 words.

Answer 1

According to the American socilogist Earl Robert Babbie, "Research is a systematic inquiry to describe, explain, predict,and contol the observed phenomenon.It involves inducive and deductive methods."It refers to the careful cosideration or study of a particular topic,cocern or problem in a scientific manner.In my view, academic research is the process of inquiry by asking questions along with subordinate reasoning , then developing the answers based on critical thinking and thoughtful reflections rather than simply collecting informations ,facts,or evidences and then assembling them thogether in a piece of paper.These questions often evolve and change throughout the research process.It is not about sticking on to a particular point of view given by a scholar but to think about its reality, bring up criticisms and finally reaching a conclusion based on one's own knowledge and inferences. One must try to be obejctive, considerable of multiple views and points instead of crawling in just one perspective.Carefully think about the assumptions, potential baises , beliefs and how these factors will probably influence your elucidation of outside sources.Another important factor to be kept in consideration is the type of audience you are to address.Wether they are able to accept your inferences or understand your way of presentation.A critical thinker or researcher regularly acknowledges the purpose of his research.A Research will always have a social purpose which might include the study of a social problem and proposing a solution to it or descending marketing strategies for a particular company based on the analysis of current economic conditions.The purpose and questions you are trying to answer determines what informations are useful and relevant.Researches can refer various articles ,journals , books, documents, newspapers , maps ,magazines etc depending on their purpose.A reseacher should simply repeat the ideas from the articles but their goal should be to think critically and develop perspectives in an objective and efficient manner.One who aims to solve public problems shall refer newspapers and blog entries rather than films and comic books.Information universe plays a very significant role in the field of research and the researches shall take an effort to understand the differences between various sources along with their complexities.While researching a particular problem you might come across several difficulties as new vocabulary ,different instincts but it provides you with the best platform where you can learn more and achieve more.You'll be socially liable to provide the best and correct inferences.The difficulty that one faces is due to the standards adopted by the authors who assume that the audience understands the professional terminologies.Whether you are looking at a webisite or a scholarly article,you shouls always take into consideration ,the view points of the author.Never ever blindly have cofidence in an article since it matches your views.Always keep an idea of what argument might arise and which statements might provide an answer to it.One can actually make meaningful contribution to knowledge by usung different approaches to an identified problem.New models,concepts and hypothesis which are valid and result oriented contributes to the existing knowledge on a subject matter.Finally one shoulsd asses the explanatory power of the conclusions.Are the conclusions based on a logical explanation that adds to our understanding of the phenomenon of interest?Does the evidence presented in the study support the coclusion?In general the audience expects a progression of knowledge ,not a reversal of all previous evidence or the appearence of some phenomenon never before observed.In fact negative findings are the most valuable kind of evidence based on one study.One should always focus on the desihn features that support the final conclusion.