Blog Post #2: Tangible Item

Rochelle Coloma

September 8, 2016

Blog Post #2 

When I first read the topic of the blog post a week ago, I was constantly thinking of a tangible object that would be prominent in my specific field of research. At the end of each day, I was always stumped. Within the past two years, majority of my classes were either a natural science course or math. I’ve taken a few Psychology introductory classes and none involved participation in a research or lab setting, whereas labs are required in many Biology or Chemistry courses. With that being said, I cannot seem to pinpoint an exact item or an obvious apparatus specifically used by Psychology researchers.

In contrast to a natural science, Psychology researchers seeks data through means of taking surveys, case studies, or naturalistic observations to aid them in their type of study.

However, for the purpose of this blog, if I had to choose something tangible, it would be a journal. In both of my Chemistry and Organic Chemistry labs, I had this habit where I wrote my data in multiple places of my notebook. In many encounters, my lab partner and I delved in countless pages of data (some even with only a number or two) and immersed ourselves with calculations and observations to finally choose those few that seemed most important to include in our report. The fact that we did not have to rely on other sources to find our information provided us a sense of security in knowing that whatever data we needed were all in one single place. In our journal, we accumulated so many pieces of data and handfuls of handwritten reminders, that we called our journal as "the big book of evidence." We often thought that having this notebook provided a validation for us that at least one thing went right in the four-hour lab. Throughout the years of being lab partners, we continued to start a new journal and barbered it with calculations, tables, and little notes in the same fashion since we started this during our Freshman year. Though unorthodox, this type of journaling is something I want to implement while participating in research.