JJ 9

I absolutely think that research should be incorporated into any writing center's program. I also think that writing center research is far more difficult than, for example, biological research. In biology we have experimental controls that are used to account for the effect of multiple variables/drivers. This type of accountability is extremely difficult when using human subjects "in the wild" primarily because, in most cases, we are limited to observational analysis as opposed to experimental. The chapter we read distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative research and both of these types of data are sensitive to the type of data and the way in which the data was collected. If I was to do a rigorous research project on a writing center issue I think I would aim to do a quantitative analysis (which has problems such as - how to distill categorical data to numerical values in an unbiased fashion, for example). A goal I would have would be to maximize sample size as the more individual data points in a set can help drown out unwanted noise (and there are tests to estimate the signal-to-noise ratio. Overall the issues I see with conducting research in the writing center are numerous but surmountable as long as the project has a reasonable scope.

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