My research methods class was one of (if not the) most interesting classes I have ever taken — I loved to learn and meld my inherent statistical thinking with psychological subjects. It also helped that my professor was so enthusiastic about research herself, which trickled down to me.
Throughout the duration of this course, I honed in on my critical thinking, communication, and presentation skills. The subject I decided to complete my research topic in was understanding situations in which consumers are being influenced by online reviews. Specifically, what cognitive motivations explain and predict consumer behavior.
I had complete control over my experiment which was both enticing and overwhelming. Great in the sense that I had the autonomy to research what I pleased; I definitely absorbed a lot of information as I was interested in the articles published on this topic. Doing this literature review also gave me a solid foundation on what psychological traits I should consider when asking my participants the survey questions. Conversely, this process was also overwhelming in that there was no obvious limit or "ending" to the preliminary research that could be done. Hence, my first lesson was the importance of synthesizing information.
(Feel free to take a look at the Survey Items Draft)
Trying to word questions without influencing or biasing the answers felt like a puzzle until I started receiving the type of responses that I was looking for. To this extent, my next lesson learned was: in order to retrieve the most comprehensive datasets, I must first communicate our needs in the most succinct manner. It took me a few "practice" survey responses before connecting my data driven intentions with my users' experience with the question.
(Feel free to take a look at the finalized survey questionnaire)
The next part of this journey was to analyze the survey responses into meaningful results. Google Survey made it really easy to transfer the results into a Google Sheet, which then made it possible to begin investigating the data. This was by far the easiest task for me, as it was pretty interesting to visualize my survey responses and starting to search for patterns felt like second nature.
Now that I had some data and visuals on paper I realized that there was a way that I needed to effectively communicate the analyzed patterns and findings to my audience. If the audience could not understand the purpose and findings of my research, my work would essentially be in vain. Thus, I took "pen to paper" and started to create an outline of how to linearly present my information.
Once I had a template I began to get my creative juices flowing and leveraged Canva to start visualizing and practicing my presentation*. In conclusion, it was fascinating to learn how reviews and a website's reputation directly impact product sales. While this may be a mere scratch on the surface of the psychological research behind psychographic segmentation, it was an incredible learning opportunity for me.
*this was an in-person presentation (which became online due to the pandemic) limited to 3 minutes in length
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