User: | Open Learning Faculty Member:
I think the difficulty in designing the study for this field research project is that I performed the intensive literature review occurs following the completion of the study. I found results in the literature that would have been useful in designing my study. For example, I found a study that showed that fern density decreased closer to a river. It would have therefore been interesting to compare fern density as the distance from the creek increased. The way the study was designed, I was unable to separate the effects of low canopy cover and the presence of water on the variables measured. It would have been good to have been able to identify additional sites with low canopy cover and no water, and high canopy cover and water and measure fern growth at these sites. Following the completion of this study, I have a far greater appreciation of collecting ecological data and the importance of randomization. It would have been much easier for me to identify an area with lots of ferns and just measure the ferns that looked big and healthy which would have biased results. Instead, I had to set up a method to randomly select ferns to measure, and as a result, there was far greater variation in the data collected, but I feel it represents an unbiased sampling of the population. Like the study of any science, bias is very difficult to avoid, especially when you are “looking” for a specific result, so the sampling techniques are so important in generating credible data.
