It Starts With Attraction
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It Starts With Attraction
How and Why You Should Do Your Own Research
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What if you could unlock the secrets to reading scholarly research articles as easily as a captivating novel? This episode promises just that, equipping you with the skills to discern credible academic work from unreliable sources. Discover how to utilize tools like Google Scholar to access the wealth of knowledge hidden within peer-reviewed studies without spending a dime. We break down the anatomy of research articles, shedding light on how to efficiently navigate sections like the abstract, methods, and results, ensuring you're armed with the critical thinking necessary to interpret scientific evidence accurately.
Embark on a journey through the complex world of research methodologies, where we unravel the distinctions between qualitative and quantitative studies. Gain insight into why understanding the methods section is vital for grasping the validity of a study’s findings. With practical examples, we illustrate how to interpret graphical data and comprehend the importance of statistical terms like "significant difference." By connecting findings back to their hypotheses, we underscore the transformative power of effective discussions and conclusions in contributing to scientific fields and identifying areas ripe for future exploration.
Elevate your research article reading game by setting clear objectives and appreciating the nuances of academic inquiry. We share strategies for sifting through multiple articles to develop a well-rounded perspective, urging you to challenge sensational headlines and seek out original research for a more accurate understanding of complex topics. With stories from dissertation experiences, this episode aims to inspire a lifelong love of learning, encouraging you to question, verify, and explore the depths of scholarly discovery. Stay curious and empowered on this enlightening research journey.
Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships
Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
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There is a lot of headlines out there that you may read and think man, this says that research recently found, or that research says that coffee is linked to cancer, or that red meat is bad for you, or X, y, z there's a hundred million things that's out there on the internet that claims that research has said it. But is it true? In today's episode, I'm going to walk you through how you can actually read research articles yourself to get a better understanding of what research actually says, instead of just trusting the news that you hear. All right, so what is a scholarly research article? Scholarly is the key word that we want to understand here.
Speaker 1:A scholarly article is an article that has been written by someone who is a scholar or a high level typically a PhD, sometimes a master's in their field of study, who has performed a rigorous research study and that study has been submitted for peer review. In the peer review process, people other experts, other people with similar credentials in the field, look at the study most of the time anonymously. They don't know who has done the study and they give their critique on the study before it is ever approved to be put into scholarly journals. So that might sound a lot of information or sound like a lot of information, but here's what you need to know. A scholarly article isn't just something someone thought of. It's been put through some pretty rigorous circumstances. It has to be held to a certain level of standard and then it is published in books, articles, journals that are considered very reputable sources. So where can you find some of these scholarly articles? A great free place that you can go is Google Scholar. So you can just go to googlecom, type in Google Scholar and it'll show you a database that Google has collected of scholarly articles. Now, not every scholarly article that you find is going to be free to access. A lot of the times, many of the scholarly articles, you have to be a student or a researcher or a professor or an alumni in order to get access to some of the bigger databases of scholarly journals and scholarly articles.
Speaker 1:But on Google Scholar you can look for studies by typing in kind of what you may want to know. So for my dissertation, for example, I did a lot of research on goal attainment, on self-esteem, on body esteem. So I would go to Google Scholar and type in those phrases and I can even look at the years that the studies came out. I can narrow it down to the past five years or in the past year, or, if I want to look at the whole past 50 years of what the research has said over time. You can narrow or expand the year search based on what you're looking for and then it will populate scholarly articles right there in Google Scholar.
Speaker 1:Now sometimes you'll be able to actually open the PDF right there and you can get it completely free, but other times you have to have a login to a special site that is a database of scholarly journals which most of the time is only for people who are in academia or the alumni, which is kind of frustrating. A lot of times they want you to pay. Like, if you're not a member, then they'll say you have to pay $20 for this article. I would highly encourage you to never pay. It's highly not worth it, or it's very likely not worth it for you to pay for it.
Speaker 1:Just really try and look through some of these more free articles if you can. Now, this is how you find it. You can also look. I believe there's some other places. You can go to Google and type in how to get access to free scholarly articles. There's probably some of the other larger databases that will provide or allow you to get a free account. Propublica might, but there are some options that you could look through Now.
Speaker 1:When you open up the article, you may see your eyes start to glaze over and the words on the page become extremely blurry, because it all seems like gibberish. Scholarly articles are not meant to be read like you would be reading Good Housekeeping or GQ magazine. They can be very, very boring. So I'm going to teach you throughout this episode how you can kind of read through it in the quickest way possible, in the most efficient way possible. But for the first couple of times you read a scholarly article, I would recommend that you read it all the way through so that you gain an appreciation for just how much work the authors and the publishers of the study have done in setting up what they're trying to do.
Speaker 1:So ultimately, when you look at a scholarly article, you're going to see there's the title of the article. Sometimes they try and be really cute with it and cute like for academics, which is kind of cheesy, but other times it's just pretty straight into the point. Either way, it's going to say the title of the article. It's going to say some keywords most of the time, like body esteem or self esteem, kind of depending on what it is that you're looking for, and then it's going to have the author's names, and there's typically several authors that have worked together to publish this study. You're then going to find that it has an introduction. It then has methods. It gets kind of gets more into why the study was needed, how they're going to do the study, how they recruited participants, what they did, what the participants actually went through, and then it's going to give the results of the study as well as future directions and conclusions. Those are the main parts that every scholarly article is going to include. There's also going to be an abstract scholarly article is going to include. There's also going to be an abstract. Now, an abstract of the scholarly article is where it's the last thing written. So it takes the highlights of the entire paper and it puts them into anywhere from three to eight or nine sentences. The abstract really does give you the overall picture of what the article is going to expand on.
Speaker 1:So if you're trying to find out, is red meat bad for you? Reading the abstract of each paper is going to help. You see, did this study. Even look at red meat consumption. How many participants did it have? Was it enough for me to even care about what the results are going to be? And what were high level the results? And it will typically tell you on a high level, this study found that there was insignificant conclusions as to the presence of red meat in the adult diet as an example. I totally made that up. Don't know if it's true or not or if there's a study out there that says something about it, but that's what the abstract is going to tell you. So when you're trying to find a couple of different articles, when you're trying to really understand something, then the abstract can be a quicker way to understand if this article is worth your time to read more fully or if it's not really what you're looking for and if you need to move on.
Speaker 1:The next part of the article is going to be the introduction. So the introduction is really where it explains the topic and the current literature on that topic. So it's going to give a lot of times that introduction. If self-esteem is kind of the main part of that title that it's looking at, then it's going to say here's what self-esteem is. Here is how self-esteem has been researched in the past and things that have been found about self-esteem, and it will typically end with saying and this is why we're studying self-esteem for this specific article. That then gets us into the methods.
Speaker 1:So the methods is basically the methodology. It is the way in which the current study was set up. It was the plan. It was the plan for how they were going to test these subjects and then look at the results. Once the results came, the method section is incredibly important and here's why it's in the method section that you begin to understand what did these people actually do? How many of them were there and how were they recruited?
Speaker 1:So for a quantitative study that's wanting to look at how red meat is impacted or how the consumption of red meat impacts the American male or the American population, as an example, then in here, when you see the methods, if you see that this is a group of 12 people that were studied for two weeks, then you can begin to see hmm, this isn't really giving me the depth and quality of study that's going to give me any confidence in what the outcomes are going to be. Instead, what you really want to look for are larger groups of people You're wanting to look for in the hundreds, maybe even the thousands. Some studies can actually even recruit up to 10,000, maybe even 100,000 participants, based on what they're studying and how they're gathering their data. It's not always true that the more participants the better, but the more participants, the higher the study can be powered. What does that mean? A study being powered to a certain level means that it has the power underneath it more or less to trust the results of the study and it makes it, to a certain extent, more generalizable to a larger population. So you really do want to find studies that focus on more people as opposed to very small groups of people.
Speaker 1:The only caveat of that is going to be if you're looking at a qualitative study and a qualitative study really does want to look at a smaller group of people, but it's trying to understand the phenomenological experience, so the lived experience of these people. So instead of understanding how did someone's self-esteem, or did someone's self-esteem increase over a two-week or two-month or a two-year period, based on X, y or Z, a qualitative study is going to ask what did it feel like? What did it feel like for these people to have a change in their self-esteem? So it's wanting to understand more of the why behind why something happens as opposed to what actually happened. But the majority of research studies that you're likely going to see reported on are going to what actually happened. But the majority of research studies that you're likely going to see reported on are going to be quantitative studies. They're looking at large amounts of data that can be more generalized to a general population.
Speaker 1:So, with all that being said, the methods section tells you the materials that were used. It's going to tell you this is the survey or the assessment that we used. This was the validity and reliability of that assessment, how the materials were prepared, the research protocol that was used. We brought them in and we had them do this in a lab this many times over this many weeks. That's what it's going to tell you. And then how the measurements were made, and then what the statistical test was that analyzed the data. Now you don't have to geek out as much about the statistical test that was used to look at the data, but what you do want to look for are words like significant. There was a significant difference. There was a significant impact on the.
Speaker 1:When it gets to the results section. That's really what you're looking for. You're also going to see, under the methodology, the breakdown of participant demographics, so you're going to understand how many of the participants were male versus female. What the study is looking at, and what this is going to help you learn and identify, is who was assessed. Because if you're looking for and this was an example of a previous episode if you're looking for how a training program, a strength training program, might affect women, but then you're looking at a bunch of data from a strength training program that had 45 men and two women, then you're not really going to get the specific answer you're looking for in that study, because there wasn't enough women to get an understanding of how it would affect women. So the population data is extremely important, especially when you're trying to understand something that you're wanting to apply to you or to a group of people that you're looking at.
Speaker 1:So then this leads us to the results section. Under the results, it gives you a lot of graphs, a lot of tables at least it should and a lot of these can be very confusing because there's a lot of italicized letters, like an italicized P or an italicized F, which means several different things. But the results section should present the findings of the study in the graph form, but also in written form that you'll be able to read and understand, and it should also include negative results. If they didn't find anything, or if they actually found something opposite of what they thought they would find, that should be included in the results section as well, but probably where all of it comes to life is in the discussion section. So it's in this section that the problem is being addressed, but without repeating the introduction. So, hey, here's a reminder of what we were trying to study. And then what did the results tell us? And they have a discussion about it. They talk about whether it was what they thought it would be or what they didn't think it would be, and it's not written in first person. No scholarly article is written in first person, so it's not like they're going to be saying.
Speaker 1:I really thought that I was going to find this to be true and, much to my dismay, it wasn't. It will instead be said something like the hypothesis that started this study was, and what we found was that the hypothesis could be accepted. That's actually not even how they say it. They'll say it some other kind of convoluted way with, like, the null hypothesis being accepted or the null hypothesis being rejected, which basically just means that the null hypothesis for every researcher. We go into our research believing that the null hypothesis is going to be true, so basically that there is not going to be any findings, and so, but we want there to be findings. We all enter into our studies believing that we're going to find something really cool. So when we do find something, instead of just accepting the secondary hypothesis, we reject the null hypothesis. So we thought nothing was going to happen. But that's rejected, which means we actually did find something.
Speaker 1:But you're going to find that in the results section of the study and the discussion will typically talk about the strong points of the study and then that will lead to the conclusion section. Now, sometimes this is a completely different part. Sometimes it's right in there with the discussion, but most of the time it is a separate part, and the final part of a paper is the conclusion. So it summarizes the real key points of the study, how the methodology was done, what the findings were. It talks about what future research should look at based on what the results of this paper was, and ultimately it's a very, very, very, very, very, very, very gives the importance of why this study was so important. So it's a wrap-up section, it's the conclusion section.
Speaker 1:So then, ultimately, how should you go about reading a research paper? The first one is to determine your goal. What is it you're wanting to find? What is it that you're wanting to understand? Maybe you're wanting to understand how running may impact someone over a long period of time, and so you should go and go try Google Scholar, and maybe you type in running programs, studies on running programs, and you begin to see what all is out there, and then you can refine the search results based on what you're wanting to know, and then you can read the abstract and understand is this really going to give me what I need? Is this worth spending my time really fleshing out, or should I continue to look for some different articles?
Speaker 1:Another thing that you can do as I said before, I recommend that the first couple of articles that you ever read, you should read all of the way through to gain an appreciation for the art of research. But then from there, the best way to read a research article is the following you read the title, you read the abstract, you read the conclusion, you actually start with the conclusion, then you go back to the methodology section. So conclusion, back to methodology, to understand who all they looked at and how they looked at them. You may skim the discussion and you may skim the introduction, but the real meat and potatoes of the high points of the articles are in the method section and in the conclusion section. So once you get more attuned at reading articles and what to look for, you can just read those two areas and really get a better idea of the true findings, and then you can always read further into the discussion or the introduction if you want to make sure that you have the right understanding and the right grasp on that topic topic.
Speaker 1:The other thing that you likely want to do when you find a research article is not to just read one and then believe that you know everything about that subject. It is pertinent to understand that there are millions, hundreds of millions of research articles. There are tens of thousands of research articles on the specific subject that you are likely wanting to understand, and so it's important to look at articles and studies that have looked at different parts of what you're wanting to study and maybe even have different views. This is what is so important in research is the ability to have a strong conviction, but also to learn about what the opposite conviction is and have that space in the middle where you can have critical thinking about why the two can both be true in research. And so I highly encourage you to not just read one article, get a variety, get a depth of articles so that you can really have a deeper and better and truer appreciation for the art of research. In fact, you'll know a good researcher when they are not 100% certain about a subject that they've probably spent their whole career researching.
Speaker 1:Because the thing about research is, the more that you do, the less you realize you know, but the more you want to know, and so you start looking at it and thinking about how it interacts and how it impacts all of these different areas of life, and it can really help to not just continue the love of learning about the subject but an appreciation for people who have different points of views than you do. I know for me, when I was going through especially the first three chapters of my dissertation, which is the introduction, the literature review and the methodology, I had to look at differing points of view of my subject matter and appreciate both of those, but also then come to my own reasoning as to why I ended up believing what I believed, but I had to cite absolutely everything. And this is the other thing that I believe is really important to understand about researchers, at least when they go through their initial dissertation process. You don't get to become a researcher and a PhD without showing a chair, like a committee of other people, including a dissertation chair, a methodologist, a content expert all of these people you have to show them you know how to do your work and it is very rigorously looked at and a very iterative approach the whole way through and so constantly, throughout it, you're getting feedback, you're getting questioned, you're getting pushback as to why you need, why you can't just say that, you can't just state something and not have a citation based in scholarly research to back up what you said for every single thing.
Speaker 1:There is not one sentence that I have been able to write in my dissertation that I haven't.
Speaker 1:That has come from just my own brain.
Speaker 1:All of it I've had to prove because it is mentioned in not just one but multiple other sources, and what that does is it begins to strip away bias.
Speaker 1:You can never fully strip away bias, however, when you actually have to go and find the scholarly research to back up what you're trying to do or what you're wanting to understand, you really do refine how you think and you begin to realize that some of the big, grandiose statements that people make are not as cut and dry or as clear as what they say. So, overall, find something that you want to learn more of, or maybe you're wanting to cross-check something that you've read in a headline. Go and find that article, read it for yourself so that you can actually see what the research says, because spoiler alert 99% of the time and that is 100% number that I made up 99% of the time what they say in the headlines is a very gross oversimplification or underestimation of what an actual research study actually said. So go and look for yourself and then hopefully this will facilitate a love of learning and a love of reading research in your own life. I hope that this was helpful for you. Until next week, stay strong.
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