Reflection 1 - Dissertation Topic

I'm feeling more confident about my proposed dissertation topics, which revolve around mental health indicators and their effects on students, instructors, and employees in higher education. Initially, I intended to pursue a topic on reading interventions. Still, I realized developing a pre-post test with a few elementary schools would take longer, and I could always complete the study later. Over the last three years, I've produced several papers and created an implementation program for bullying awareness; several people have approached me to collaborate on bullying and cyberbullying research.

The bullying topic grew into other areas as my cohort was intrigued by what I would do next. In one of my statistical courses, Scaling Methods, I approached my instructor about secondary data on adolescent behaviors. Interestingly, Dr. Baker became my major professor, and we worked on the secondary data and how to understand it. It takes a lot of analysis, checking honest responses, and understanding someone else's instrument and code book. I reviewed several iterations of different data sets before comprehending the third one.

One of my research interests is big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Language (ML), and I learned a lot and was able to leverage my IT background working with secondary data. I wrote a journal article for my course assignment in the Scaling Methods course and presented my research. The professor and the class said I should expand it into a dissertation paper. I entered the Multi-disciplinary Information Research Symposium  (MIRS)conference, got great feedback on the topic, and won the poster contest.

I'm doing well with the literature review and have a ton of publications on my dissertation topic. Still, I want to be more organized and efficient to focus on the research and synthesize the information into the chapters required for dissertation writing. I have used Mendeley reference manager but am considering investing in Citavi reference manager software. I feel confident about my proposed theoretical frameworks and research methods but may need to examine others to ensure I am effective. I am passionate about the dissertation topics I submitted because they impact us globally, locally, and in the education setting. One of my interests is human performance, and when a student or employee encounters risk factors, their academic or job performance suffers in some way. Students should feel a sense of belonging and a connection to their school environment and have a positive learning experience, and employees feel connected to the workplace.