he said she said

It's been fascinating to really look into issues that before I would assume are clean cut with simple answers.  In class we've been talking a lot about how cultural perceptions can completely change a group of people's or a person's ideas on a given topic.  The topics can be seemingly small, like how to act socially appropriately, as well as extremely big, like whether or not a genocide occurred.  In class I gave the example of the Tibetan exile or "genocide" as it's been referred to in the literature.  It's easy to find an argument on either extreme side of the debate as to whether or not the Tibetans are oppressed by the Chinese or not.  Even now as I sit here, I actually am not quite sure about what has occurred in Tibet and China and India, and I'm left with the desire to know more.

This learning has extended to learning in my graduate research courses.  We are currently studying how to determine whether or not an intervention or teaching method is an evidence based practice.  A huge problem in defining an evidence based practice lies in the fact that researchers and professionals cannot even agree on what method of research yields true experimental results.  It was so confusing to me to read one article that swears by both group experimental design and single subject research design.  Another author claimed that clearly group experimental design is the only method that can truly account for all variables and therefore declare a functional relation.  After class tonight, it was pretty apparent that my professor believes strongly in single subject research.... Still, I don't know what the truth is.  Again, this is another example of completely different perceptions causing conflict in an issue that should be clear cut, or at least one would think so...

I've been left thinking how every time I've seen the term "evidence based practice," that really I have no idea how valid that is.  There are so many factors that come into play when determining whether or not there is a true functional relation, and as researchers are even now debating what this factors are, it's hard to believe anything is actually evidence based. 

In my current research, I know my study won't yield a functional relation, so I'm not extremely hung up on this topic.  However, it does relate to my research in that results can be so subjective if a study is not peer-reviewed and published.  I hope to account for as many variables as I can so as to have a stronger argument in answer to my research question.  It's going to be difficult with the extremely unique population I've chosen to work with...