Understanding Research (43 page)

[Researchers] are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics.

(Medawar 1982: 116)

A couple of years ago, one of my master-level research students flew into my office in a panic; the dissertation project was stalled, she had no idea what to read, what her research question really was, or how to start. Whilst this was not the first – nor the last – crisis, this time she paused mid-stream and said, ‘I just don’t understand; tell me, what
is
research?!’

My heart sank, blood pressure went up, brow furrowed; ‘this late in the year and she still doesn’t get it?!’ I thought. Then I realized this is actually a legitimate question and if I were honest with myself it was probably one (of the many) I too was once too afraid to ask. So, as all supervisors must, I took a deep breath and asked her to take a seat. We then talked through the specific concerns she was struggling with at that particular moment. I am pleased to say that the final result was an excellent one; as accomplished a project as any other submitted that year; including dissertations completed by any number who had made it clear that they knew exactly what the answer is to this question.

In many respects this book has addressed this disconnect: the gap between our real needs for guidance and what we think we already understand, still need to learn
about research, taken from – positive or negative – experience, books, mentors, public events, and classmates. There is actually not that much separating a student going through similar anxieties and blocks who thinks they don’t understand what the research dissertation element of their degree is about and those who are very clear about what they are doing, in what way, and for what reasons. Either way, my hope is that a student could walk into my, or someone else’s office a little less panicked with this book tucked under their arm.

As we have come to the end of this book, though most likely not the end of a particular project or ongoing path of inquiry, this chapter recaps the main themes and rationale of the approach taken here. The final section wraps things up in order for you, and me, to be able to get on with whatever line of inquiry (always open, always cumulative) or particular research project we are currently pursuing.

One reader of the manuscript asked me to give a ‘friendly hint’, a clearer idea of what my ‘take’ is on where
exactly
the quantitative–qualitative divide at stake in this book lies. However, in practice things are not so clear-cut. First, because pinpointing let alone solving the ‘problem of divides’ (to borrow from Karl Popper, in Jarvie 2005: 821) is that these are susceptible to the vagaries of time, trends, and economic (dis)incentives. Even in its most trenchant formulations, the notion of which works best, quantitative or qualitative modes of research, has been substantially rethought and fought over in academe over the last half-century. In recent years though, the computational and interconnecting characteristics of computer-mediated communications, web-based research, digital data-gathering and analysis tools, teaching and learning have created a particular edge to these debates. Computers and, moreover, the internet increasingly mediate conventional research, now presenting virtual research fields, digital methods, online communities, and digital subjects as new research terrain.

As real and imagined dichotomies between qualitative and quantitative work are played out in the literature, methods curricula come and go in the classroom. The way implicit positions on research in its more narrow rendition as method is one of the more sensitive aspects to success in gaining research funding, accreditation, and legitimacy – within academe and beyond. This disconnect between what gets taught – or not, and what gets funded – or not, crystallizes in university recruitment strategies and postgraduate employment opportunities the world over. Students are expected to align themselves accordingly, and often without question. These relationships mesh with important debates about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ scholarship, good or bad science; about what sort of research is the most relevant at the time for society at large. Meanwhile, money and kudos outside research institutions flow accordingly in that think tanks, policy-making circles, educational curricula, access to decision making, and faculty recruitment strategies reproduce these power relations in latent and explicit ways.

The literatures underwriting these distinctions are made up of an amalgam of mutually exclusive and intersecting worldviews, theoretical brand names, and a
myriad interrelated as well as sharply diverging techniques for gathering, analysing and then assembling evidence. Stronger still differences about what counts as evidence per se inform these practicalities. All of these unfold along various disciplinary codes of conduct and research ethics. Gate-keepers and defenders of any approach claiming to have found the ‘philosopher’s stone’ for conducting research purport that this way brings us closer to some sort of truth about the object of study in question.
¹
Funding flows, personal and professional standing, careers, and respective orbits of power, influence, and privilege crystallize accordingly.

In the meantime as students or supervisors we all have to deal with the research project at hand, get it off the ground, executed, wrapped up, and out the door. There is little time or motivation to navigate the rich and diverse research methods/research skills literature. So, I shall defer for the time being on stating categorically where I think these divides really matter, and who calls the shots precisely because they move and differ according to project, researcher, institutional context, geographical place, and timing. Students and researchers too, as individuals and community members, experience and reproduce any number of divides, take part in their resolution or codification as we move through, or out of academe.

Doing research today takes place in an atmosphere of initiatives that ostensibly aim to foster disciplinary cross-pollination and collaboration even as disciplinary specialization and exclusive, single-method approaches are becoming arguably even more entrenched. Beyond inter-departmental initiatives and international research platforms, important geographic alignments of research funding streams, such as the European Research Area and related educational European Union member-state agreements to standardize higher education
outputs
along with an increased emphasis on a particular understanding of
impacts
have implications for the interaction between research institutions, government organs, business, and society at large. Regional histories, job markets, and funding economies make themselves felt at the methods baseline; the USA differs markedly from the UK, and the latter two differ from (western) continental Europe for instance. Students need to understand where and why they are doing their research in the ways they opt to do so, and how to navigate and negotiate where needed as they embark upon and then, hopefully, exit a research process.

Moreover, shifts within university funding streams have seen department restructurings that throw scholars from very different ‘worldviews’ together. ‘Hardcore Quants’ find themselves rubbing shoulders with ‘Fuzzy Theorists’ in the staff common-room, or conferring on student assessment, or co-supervising a research student. Finally, there is the explosion in digital research tools and online fields along with computer-mediated research techniques and multimedia-based applications being put to use in many ways. These also have varying implications for both the entrenchment and redrawing of this divide, for the ethics of doing research in virtual and classical fields, and for shifting patterns of scholarly accountability that cannot be reduced to simplistic duels between
mainstream
vs.
critical
or
virtual
vs.
material
social relations,
normative
vs.
positivist
theory. Providing sustenance – practical and intellectual – for researchers who need to be able to travel to and fro across these real-existing divisions, let alone in cross-cultural, international research settings, a different approach is called for; we all need to be able to converse with those from the ‘other side’.

In this sense the book has aimed to speak to the daily realities of the research in what are fluid, demographically diverse albeit unequal terrains. It recognizes that disciplines and sub-disciplines speak with various methodological-theoretical voices and these draw students accordingly, academic fashions and wider societal trends included. By the same token, the often combative if not outright hostile tenor of many debates around about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ research that students witness, or experience first-hand, tends to obscure the fact that, at some point decisions need to be made. Knowing why and at what cost is more the point.

In the spirit of dialogue and open-ended puzzling, the book has offered practical guidance rather than prescription based on experience-based and philosophical insights into what makes everyday life as a researcher tick. However, it has also recognized that students often first enter the process by way of a particular methodological preference or set of debates, if not through being trained in a particular school of thought about ‘best practices’, ‘scientific reasoning’ or ‘critical theory’. It looked at a range of tactics and tools for not only solving puzzles along this path but also dealing with more intransigent conundrums as it links these on-the-job research skills to competencies students should have in order to talk with, and work across any number of divides.

Along with others who take a more holistic approach to research as a practical and intellectual endeavour, one that unfolds in historically and socioculturally drenched settings (ivory towers included) this book sees these activities as not just dry, arcane exercises but also as endeavours that offer researchers a lot on a personal and professional level. As well as dispassionate observers of social phenomena, technicians, disciplinary specialists or generalists, researchers can be passionate. We bring to our projects attributes we already have (Medawar 1982) but also, hopefully, we gain new ones. Moreover, the things we discover about the world, our society, and ourselves can often prove to be as fascinating and provocative as they are confirmations or extensions of existing knowledge. The skills acquired during a research project are specific to that endeavour – its academic ecosystem – to be sure. But they are also ‘transferable’ to other parts of everyday life and work. It is often only much later that students realize this for themselves.

Whatever your baseline position may be about the point or social relevance of academic modes of generating knowledge, or the role played by your own choices for your future career path, understanding is not a pre-given. Nor is the divide informing this book, and the way we need to reposition ourselves along its shifting sands immutable, no matter how much it appears to define what sort of scholar we (think) we want to become. When entering and then exiting the now interconnected physical and computer-mediated domains in which all sorts of researchers engage with their objects of inquiry we are all also engaging in any number of sociocultural relationship and power hierarchies. These go hand-in-hand with longstanding and newer debates about the pursuit of knowledge (scholarly, scientific, common sense) or, if you prefer, truth.

Below is a template for composing your own consent form relevant to the sort of interview and context.

Thank you for agreeing to this interview. As previously discussed, these questions relate to a . . . in . . . at [institution]. The dissertation investigates . . .

Your responses will be treated with the appropriate levels of confidentiality, i.e. anonymous unless prior permission granted to be named; interviewees have access to the dissertation if they so choose . . .

The material gained from the [interviews] will be used specifically in relation to the aforementioned dissertation topic only.

Signed: . . .

Print name: . . .

Date: . . .

Prescriptive and proscriptive ethical duties and obligations for the academic researching of cyberspace or the ‘internet’ are not significantly different to those applying to traditional qualitative and/or quantitative research in human and animal communities. There are areas of consensus about right and wrong and good and bad in relation to researching and researchers. In the UK there are also legal considerations particularly in any research concerning the process of establishing and developing human relationships online. There are also well-established research centres and journals exploring internet and cyberspace ethics and many academic institutions have publicly published their own guidelines.