• Question: What was the research method your supervisor introduced you to which made you passionate about research?

    Asked by anon-179124 to Maria, John, Claire on 18 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Maria Montefinese

      Maria Montefinese answered on 18 Jun 2018:

      Hi Guam! 🙂 Thank you so much for your question! My current mentor introduced me to the use of the functional magnetic resonance imaging. This is a really step forward for my research because in the past I used other more indirect techniques to understand what happens in our brain during language tasks. Now I can actually have pictures of which brain areas are more active and thus more involved when people perform these tasks.
      All the best,
      Maria

    • Photo: Claire Melia

      Claire Melia answered on 19 Jun 2018:

      Hi Guam, thanks for the question!

      For me, it was the method of Conversation Analysis. As the name suggests, this method looks at how we interact with one another. Anything from the words we use to how we take turns in talking. We do a lot of this unconsciously and it’s fascinating to see how there are underlying patterns to how to we talk, even if we don’t realise it ourselves!
      Personally, I had never really enjoyed the experimental or quantitative side of psychology and I also struggled a little with how open some qualitative methods could be. Conversation Analysis was a great middle ground for me as it was qualitative, but it was very rigorous and there are quite strict rules about how much you can infer from that data. I’ve now moved on to working with other qualitative methods in this area (different projects needs different approaches), but Conversation Analysis is still my main passion!

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