The work that has been completed over the past few weeks has helped my understanding and analysis of articles and other forms of new information in other classes and in my personal life. The short article we read about confirmation bias has been extremely helpful in my developmental psychology class. For one of the assignments, the goal is to find a specific article in the field of developmental psychology, and to analyze the meaning and purpose of the article. After doing some preliminary research, which I most likely would not have done before taking this class, I decided that I wanted to focus on the development of racial awareness in adolescents. However, I was struggling with articles with bias in the analysis and conclusion sections of the studies, and after reading this article I realized that I unintentionally searched for studies that fit with my hypothesis and preconceived notions about this topic. Once I changed my search words to fit the description of the study, and not the results I was looking for, this solved the problem I was facing. This idea of confirmation bias made me think of the other aspects of my research in other classes and personal life could be biased. One of the personal goals I had set for myself in the beginning of the class was to keep an open mind while researching instead of trying to find agreement in sources. This made me realize that making this try of change in behavior would not happen without a specific and concerted effort to fix this issue. So, I decided to go back to some of the original sources I had found for this project and tried to replicate the original words I had used for the search. I realized that I had slightly biased search phrases which I decided to slightly alter in an attempt to find some other sources. This alteration in my search words resulted in the finding of new sources which I added to the list of sources that I was possibly going to use for the annotated bibliography. However, there were some questions that came up while I was trying to find some of these new sources. One question that struck me was: how should one actively search for unbiased sources if the nature of the research is based on perspective and opinions? Are perspectives and opinions important in certain situations and aspects of research? I think that this is highly dependent on the specific research question and data being collected. However, we must be very careful to not completely discount opinions in the field of research because it can provide unique interpretations of results.
