An alteration of my title and my reasons for cancelling my primary research
As I become more invested in my research, I find myself veering towards a certain aspect of false memories that isn’t really encompassed in my original title. My initial question being ‘How do false memories corrupt the world around us?’. I have found a few sources of research which inspire me to look more into how an individual can be changed internally by false memories in terms of their emotions, relationships, and beliefs. I don’t feel that this is represented in the initial question. Therefore, my new, altered title is ‘How do false memories corrupt our identities and the world around us?’.
In a previous blog post, I had mentioned a few potential ideas for primary research and I have thought for a long time as to the benefits and reasons of conducting primary research and reasons against it. As a whole, I do believe that primary research in the form of interviews and questionnaires are very beneficial in gaining real insight into peoples opinions on certain topics however for my topic, I am confident in the fact I personally don't feel like my project would benefit from such methods.
My ideas were to either interview one of my peers on a childhood memory and then check the facts by their parents to see if their memory of the event lined up or to interview a larger group of people on their memories of a global-scale event in the last few years. These experimental methods, from a psychology point of view, are not exactly beneficial research. As this primary research would be classed technically, even on an extremely small scale, as psychological research I decided to assess it as such and mimic true psychologist's ways of thinking when weighing up if experiments should be approved to go ahead.
The first design for primary research is flawed in many ways of its reliability and validity which swayed me in the direction against it. Firstly, comparing somebody's (assumed) false memories against their parent's recollection of the event is reliant on the idea of their parent's memory of the event is correct. The parent's details given on the memory would need to be factual in order to act as a control for comparison against details given by the participant. However, as false memories occur at any age, it is just as easy to assume that both the participant and their parent could have differing yet equally false memories of the childhood event. This hugely decreases the validity of studying if the participant has formed false memories of a childhood event as I cannot accurately measure how true the memory is as I could only gather qualitative data from equally possible inaccurate sources.
Additionally, the reliability of this study would be compromised as the sample is incredibly small, consisting of one participant. This means that any results gathered, whether positively pointing towards false memories or not, couldn't be generalised to the whole population- many people experience false memories in vastly different ways so the research would only be relevant to that single case.
Another main reason why I believe I shouldn't go ahead with both examples of primary research is that they are essentially copied designs of other's larger and more coherent research so my research simply feels like a cheap imitation of psychologist's hard work. For example, the second idea to interview a large group of people on a global event was 'inspired' by the Netflix documentary I watched which was featured in another blog post in which they conducted a study to compare people's first hand memories of a globally covered terrorist attack. The more I thought about it, the more I realised this wasn't an 'inspired' idea but rather a copied idea. Not only would my study, through reasons of opportunity, be focused on a much smaller scale with less likely positive results, it is also simply not an original idea. Therefore even if my results were conclusive, which they likely wouldn't be as it would have to focus on a very targeted group of people, it wouldn't serve any purpose for teaching me new things about my topic.
Overall, I personally would rather focus my time on this project on gaining more in depth, detailed research based upon other people's studies and results which show much more convincing evidence that false memories exist than my own would. It gives me the opportunity to delve deeper into the science behind the research as oppose to spending months attempting to imitate similar experiments or interviews which don't give me any new information due to similar results already being published that i have researched. I understand that I would gain some skills in gathering a sample, and creating a set of interview questions, for example, however I would like to prioritise building my knowledge since it is such a scientific topic with lots of available and very informative research already composed.
My ideas were to either interview one of my peers on a childhood memory and then check the facts by their parents to see if their memory of the event lined up or to interview a larger group of people on their memories of a global-scale event in the last few years. These experimental methods, from a psychology point of view, are not exactly beneficial research. As this primary research would be classed technically, even on an extremely small scale, as psychological research I decided to assess it as such and mimic true psychologist's ways of thinking when weighing up if experiments should be approved to go ahead.
The first design for primary research is flawed in many ways of its reliability and validity which swayed me in the direction against it. Firstly, comparing somebody's (assumed) false memories against their parent's recollection of the event is reliant on the idea of their parent's memory of the event is correct. The parent's details given on the memory would need to be factual in order to act as a control for comparison against details given by the participant. However, as false memories occur at any age, it is just as easy to assume that both the participant and their parent could have differing yet equally false memories of the childhood event. This hugely decreases the validity of studying if the participant has formed false memories of a childhood event as I cannot accurately measure how true the memory is as I could only gather qualitative data from equally possible inaccurate sources.
Additionally, the reliability of this study would be compromised as the sample is incredibly small, consisting of one participant. This means that any results gathered, whether positively pointing towards false memories or not, couldn't be generalised to the whole population- many people experience false memories in vastly different ways so the research would only be relevant to that single case.
Another main reason why I believe I shouldn't go ahead with both examples of primary research is that they are essentially copied designs of other's larger and more coherent research so my research simply feels like a cheap imitation of psychologist's hard work. For example, the second idea to interview a large group of people on a global event was 'inspired' by the Netflix documentary I watched which was featured in another blog post in which they conducted a study to compare people's first hand memories of a globally covered terrorist attack. The more I thought about it, the more I realised this wasn't an 'inspired' idea but rather a copied idea. Not only would my study, through reasons of opportunity, be focused on a much smaller scale with less likely positive results, it is also simply not an original idea. Therefore even if my results were conclusive, which they likely wouldn't be as it would have to focus on a very targeted group of people, it wouldn't serve any purpose for teaching me new things about my topic.
Overall, I personally would rather focus my time on this project on gaining more in depth, detailed research based upon other people's studies and results which show much more convincing evidence that false memories exist than my own would. It gives me the opportunity to delve deeper into the science behind the research as oppose to spending months attempting to imitate similar experiments or interviews which don't give me any new information due to similar results already being published that i have researched. I understand that I would gain some skills in gathering a sample, and creating a set of interview questions, for example, however I would like to prioritise building my knowledge since it is such a scientific topic with lots of available and very informative research already composed.
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