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GLD E-portfolio
Throughout my time at USC, I slowly built my career to focus on two things: autism and research. As I was growing in this journey, I learned incredibly important skills in the classroom that I was then able to apply outside of the classroom. One of these such skills was learning how to conduct research. I believe this skill has two main focal points. The first is the ability to find what is missing in research. In terms of autism, there is a lot of knowledge of the disorder and how to relate to it. However, I learned to pick through this research, dig deep, and find what has yet to be researched. The second main focal point of research is to be able to follow the protocol and format required in a publishable research article. I was able to develop these skills starting in my Research Methods Lab class, PSYC 228, and then put them into action in my own individual research. Thus, when I begin to summarize all that I have learned with these experiences, I come to this conclusion: Succeeding in research requires creativity and the ability to understand what is missing while also fitting these ideas and insights into rigid research protocols and procedures.
To come to this conclusion, I first had to learn the basic framework of how to conduct research. In PSYC 228 I was tasked with creating my own study. While I picked a general topic, studying the relationship between general knowledge of autism and acceptance of autistic behaviors, I first had to conduct a literature review to assess what had already been done in research. The result of this learning is evident in numbers four and five of my Lab 10 assignment (highlighted in yellow), yet this does not show the learning that took place in order to produce the two screenshots. To get to this point, I first had to learn how to find articles that were relevant to the study I was creating. After some trial and error, I settled on these four key words: Autism, views, education, and students. It is with these four words that I was able to narrow my search down to relevant research articles. Second, I had to learn how to edit the search criteria so that it produced academic journals with linked full texts that were published within the last five years. Third, I learned the importance of using more than one search engine so that I could access to as many relevant research articles as possible. Thus, the highlighted portions of my Lab 10 worksheet display the end result of this learning journey. Continually, by conducting the literature review, I was able to discover a gap in the research in regard to acceptance of autistic behaviors on college and university campuses. After a thorough literature review, I was unable to find any questionnaires that assessed the acceptance of autistic behavior without identifying the person as autistic. It is in this discovery that I learned how to use my inventiveness to create a questionnaire that was yet to exist (highlighted in green). As the scenarios demonstrate, I learned how to transform my experiences with autistic behavior into a quantifiable and measurable scale that assesses the participant’s acceptance levels of autistic behavior. While the questionnaire was not reliable or valid at this time because I created the questions based off of my own experience with autism and had no other input, I still learned how to use creativity in regard to research. It was not until my own individual research where I was more able to tap into the rigid requirements of conducting research and the importance of creating verifiable questionnaires.
When working in Dr. Bradshaw’s Early Social Development and Intervention Lab, which focuses on the relationship between infant development and early detection of ASD, I was always encouraged to explore my own research. One of these such explorations was to expand upon the research I conducted in PSYC 228. As stated earlier, my study was focused on the relationship between autism acceptance and autism awareness, yet I was the sole creator of the autism acceptance scenarios. When talking with Dr. Bradshaw, she expressed her concern that the Institutional Review Board (IRB), as well as the broader research community, would be unlikely to accept the autism acceptance scenarios I had created without further validation. Thus, even though the development of the scenarios required a lot of creativity, the next step was editing the scenarios so that they were verifiable, therefore blending the creative aspect of the scenarios with the rigidity required in research. I did so by rewording some the questions so that they were consistent in what they were measuring. Furthermore, I also put a name to the scenarios I created, now called the Autism Acceptance Scale. The difference between the autism acceptance scenarios versus the Autism Acceptance Scale seems trivial but is of the utmost importance (both highlighted in green). For example, one question in the autism acceptance scenario is as follows:
You are having coffee with your friends and you notice a student laying down sugar packets in a straight line. How likely are you to make a comment to your friends about this behavior? Please respond 1-7. 1 is NOT likely and 7 is HIGHLY likely
​​A very similar scenario in the Autism Acceptance Scale, also assessing restrictive, repetitive behavior, is as follows:
You are in a group with some classmates and one person refuses to step on any cracks in the sidewalk, causing the group to walk slower than you would normally walk. How likely are you to be exasperated? Please respond 1-7. 1 is NOT likely and 7 is HIGHLY likely
The important distinction between these two scenarios lies in in the wording of the question. In the first scenario, the participant is supposed to acknowledge how likely they are to act on a scenario. However, in the second scenario, the participant acknowledges how likely they are to feel an emotion. This distinction between acting and feeling is incredibly important because it demonstrates how the autism acceptance scenarios were not always measuring the same outcome. Thus, by creating the Autism Acceptance Scale, I was able to edit the scenarios so that they were consistent, thereby helping with the validity of the scale. Thus, by conducting my own individual research, I learned how to edit what I had previously created so that it fit within the rigidness of research requirements.
To further validate the reliability of the autism acceptance questions, I chose to expand upon my research project so that it would have two goals, referred to as Aim 1 and Aim 2 in the IRB application. While Aim 2 sought to replicate the experiment I conducted in PSYC 228, this time with approval from the IRB, Aim 1 was created to further increase the validity of the Autism Acceptance Scale (as highlighted in yellow). While I already added one point of validation by making sure that all of the scenarios measured the same outcome, through the mentorship with Dr. Bradshaw I learned that another step was necessary: validation of something new in research requires the input of others. Thus, the purpose of Aim 1 is to send a survey to various autism support groups on Facebook to gather data on the accuracy of the scenarios. By doing so, the Autism Acceptance Scale will no longer be a scale solely developed by myself but one that was created with input from multiple people in the autistic community. Adding this aim to the IRB protocol demonstrates my learning of the importance of peer review and input in relation to validity. Thus, by conducting my individual research, I learned the importance of validating the scenarios I created so that they fit within the rigid criteria set forth in research.
In PSYC 228, I learned how to conduct a literature review as well as how to creatively produce new research. However, my learning in the development of an IRB approved study taught me how to harness the creativity that comes with producing new research so that it fit within the rigid requirements that come with conducting IRB approved research. Thus, in developing my own research study, I learned how to perfectly blend creativity with rigor and produce a study that was approved by the IRB and will be publishable once completed.
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