You may recall that in my previous post about group work, I was enjoying working within a large group as we all had many ideas about our research and project. However as our project went on and our research had to become more specific we had problems agreeing on which direction we were heading, our topic was child abuse and with this there were many avenues we could go down. As 'child abuse' is such an umbrella term, we realised we would have to narrow our research down in order to have a concise set of results from our research. We decided to not look at child sexual abuse as the topic is so broad, however this did pose us difficulties, for example there were many more news articles on child sexual abuse than articles on domestic child abuse, which we wanted to study. Despite this minor set back, we eventually found enough data and research in order to draw a conclusion from. In my previous blog on secondary data and its use in social scientific research, I stated that a major problem with secondary data is, sometimes we cannot be sure that the source of the data is reliable. This was another problem we came across, the statistics we gathered from all three media sources, The Sun, The Guardian and The BBC did not reference their statistics where cited; therefore they lacked credibility and reliability. Similarly we also looked at statistics from the NSPCC, which we used as our main source of official statistics. This was good as their were plenty of statistics at our finger tips; however as they were charity statistics we had to be careful and not take them at face value as they may have been biased.
Regarding the group itself, I became frustrated... the lack of attendance became a huge issue as it hindered our progress, when all of the other groups were preparing and researching, myself and another member of our group became annoyed as we could not get on with our work without the rest of our group as they all had relevant information which we could not access. This meant we were rushing towards the end of the project and did not finalise everything properly. The lack of attendance caused tension and a divide within our group, which again hindered our progress which then led to arguments. Despite this, I was pleased with the way we presented our findings and research to our peers, however I was a little annoyed as one of our group did not turn up! Our poster looked good and I was pleased with the layout and design, however we were late getting it printed so we had to display it on the interactive screen; which in my opinion took the edge off. It was interesting to see what the rest of the groups had chosen to research and there was a lot of variety, E.g the current university strikes, the death penalty and abortion laws in Ireland. I thought this was brilliant as each group presented their ideas and findings, it was also interesting to see and hear about the variety of research methods they used.
In conclusion, as much as I enjoyed the experience of working in a group and carrying out a social research project, I would not like to do group work again at university unless it was with a smaller number. I found the group and the dynamics in the group too difficult to work with and the poor attendance made the research project extremely difficult as it was hard to correspond and move forward.
