Read Understanding Research Online
Authors: Marianne Franklin
Understanding Research (12 page)
Every research has to start somewhere; typically, the starting point is an idea. The big question, however, is how to go about finding an idea that will serve as a good launching point to a research project.
(Berg 2009: 23)
So what about your reasons, the rationale – aims and objectives – of the project? Sometimes here the research question may well be lurking. Stipulating your personal reasons, as well as your more ambitious aims for doing a project, particularly when trying to decide between more than one idea, gives direction to the project. That direction can, and often does change; aims and objectives get refined, or overturned along the way. When faced with the question ‘Why are you doing this research?’ or even the more hostile one, ‘Why are you bothering?’, be straight-up: why do you think this inquiry is worth pursuing?
One’s analysis of theories tends to influence strongly the position one takes on issues such as observation, confirmation and testing.
(Suppe in Craig 2005: 1016)
Sometimes the reasons for doing research in certain ways and not in others are obscure, boiling down to sociocultural conventions or unwritten codes of behaviour and allegiance, as much as they are grist to the mill of larger epistemological and ontological debates between philosophers and social theorists.
The first step in project design is where students, and researchers embarking on new projects, find that they too realize that there are many things they don’t understand. Recalling the overview of the theory–method relationship from
Chapter 2
, how we collect evidence and then analyse this material does not happen in either
a social or intellectual vacuum; all researchers start from implicit and explicit assumptions about what they (are going to) observe, how they observe it, and how they expect to come to understand it.
Recalling the discussion about observation in
Chapter 1
, conceptualizing, researching, and underlying worldviews are intertwined. It is often only at moments of tension (when confronted with a counter-intuitive finding) or direct challenge from others that these underlying assumptions make their presence felt; if not in how we respond to any criticism, then how we attempt to articulate these assumptions in order to pre-empt such foundational challenges. A basic truism is at the heart of these discussions: not everybody sees the same thing, or thinks differently about what they think they see (
Figure 3.1
).
To recap: in terms of how you work out the theory–method relationship pertinent to your inquiry, consider the following elements as decisions about
- Theoretical frameworks – or
substantive theories
– and how these speak to their respective disciplinary precursors. - How a
worldview
is in play; implicit positions about how the world works, and our place in it, and how these correlate with as well as diverge from quantitative and qualitative demarcations.
- Recall too that no data-gathering (
Chapter 6
) or mode of analysis (
Chapter 7
) can be de-linked from any number of ‘theoretical orientations’ (Berg 2009: 4). - One way to encapsulate the push and pull between these various elements is to talk of how they all contribute to our design as ‘methodological strategies’ (Berg 2009: 4) or ‘research strategies’ (Creswell 2009).
The notion of science and
scientific method
has become synonymous with the physical sciences, which in turn are positioned as diametrically opposed to the arts. The transposition of these ideas about the correct, right way of doing research has been grist to major rows and partial reconciliations across the modern academe and over many centuries.
One conflict between the lines of the discussions so far, often evoked if not explicitly reiterated, is one that arguably has become more pronounced as disciplinary borders correlate more and more closely with career paths, funding, and ‘ideal types’ in terms of best practice criteria for research success. This is the notion that the arts and the (natural) sciences do not, and cannot get along (see Snow 1993). Historically this dichotomy can be challenged; there are many examples of individuals being both accomplished scientists, philosophers, and artists. These historical accounts are beyond the bounds of this book. Suffice it to say that its entrenchment and emergence as a truism for academics and the general public alike remains a source of friction even today. Many have lamented it and many still work to surmount what is both stereotype and fact of working life in research institutions the world over. So what exactly is at stake?
Alan Chalmers puts it in a nutshell in his exploration of ‘modern views about the nature of science’ (Chalmers 2004: xi) when he notes how science is ‘highly esteemed. Apparently it is a widely held belief that there is something special about science and its methods’ (Chalmers 2004: ix). He goes onto to suggest that this received wisdom begs the question of ‘what, if anything, is so special about science? What is this “scientific method” that allegedly leads to especially meritorious or reliable results?’ (ibid.). And, as philosophers are wont to do, he then proceeds to state that
questions concerning the distinctiveness of scientific knowledge, as opposed to other kinds of knowledge, and the exact identification of the scientific method are seen as fundamentally important and consequential. As we shall see, however, answering these questions is by no means straightforward.
( Chalmers 2004: xx)
Take a moment to ask yourself what your standpoint is on the following propositions in
Box 3.4
: in themselves integral to substantive theories as well as worldviews.
BOX 3.4
WHAT IS SCIENCE?
- 1 Science is distinguishable by its generating knowledge that is ‘derived from the facts of experience [that] can only be sanctioned in a carefully and qualified form, if it is to be sanctioned [as science] at all’ (Chalmers 2004: xxi).
On the other hand, there are grounds to argue – as many have and still do – that
- 2 ‘scientific knowledge can neither be conclusively proved nor conclusively disproved by reference to the facts, even if the availability of those facts is assumed’ (Chalmers 2004: xxi).
Stronger still, if indeed scientific theories, and the knowledge they claim to generate about how the world works, ‘cannot be conclusively proved or disproved and that reconstructions [of preceding moments of scientific discovery or philosophical arguments bear] little resemblance to what actually goes on in science’ (ibid.), then
- 3 ‘science has no special features that render it intrinsically superior to other kinds of knowledge such as ancient myths and voodoo’ (Chalmers 2004: xxi–xxii, citing Feyerabend 1978).
Delving into the various ways philosophers address these propositions, with reference to or despite what practitioners claim (see Callon and Latour 1981, Feyerabend 1978, Kuhn 1962) is beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, the social and economic status granted to modern science – see proposition 1 in
Box 3.4
above – as a set of principles (theory) and practices (scientific method) for objective, truthful and reliable knowledge about not only the physical but also the social and cultural worlds we live in, in recent times is hard to ignore.
The point Chalmers is making, a sub-text of all methods texts and headlines for many critical interventions, is that warranting the claim ‘scientific’, narrowly or broadly defined, in modern times, is the idea that ‘what is so special about science is that it is derived from the facts, rather than being based on personal opinion’ (Chalmers 2004: xx). What constitutes a
fact
vis-à-vis an
opinion
, who decides and how any position is supported by the ‘evidence’ is, again, related to views on the relationship between observation, experience, and scientific, or non-scientific knowledge about how the world works. Referring to different worldviews is a way of encapsulating these deep-seated standpoints.
Various commitments, individual and institutional, to certain views about how the world works can be mapped onto the demarcation lines that often get drawn, rightly
or wrongly, between quantitative and qualitative research and their derivative schools of thought. Like others, I would distinguish between the myriad roughly hewn and nuanced positions making up three
very broad
worldviews. The groupings below are diverse and dynamic; the terms of reference used are also in themselves contestable. For your research needs you will need to go a lot deeper than these approximations of often inchoate, and conflicting positions, to make sense of them for your question and design.
The first worldview is one I shall call
empirical-positivist
; often seen as the ‘default’ position because it is identified as the ‘mainstream’ position in academe and society at large. This take on things is based on the premise that what we know is down to what we observe, phenomena that are ‘given’ as empirical data. Any scientific truth based on that data has to be created by objective forms of knowledge creation. From this flow other premises in varying degrees:
- the physical world exists
a priori
to ideas - humans are rational actors
- human behaviour is observable, and predictable generally speaking
- facts are derived from observation
- knowledge is objective when based on
deductive reasoning - scientific research generates general laws.
In practical terms, this view holds that the observation point and the observer exist separately from the object observed; therefore error and bias have to be minimized as much as possible for findings to be valid, results considered legitimate.
One way to illustrate this worldview is in
Figure 3.2
, a photo taken from the Greenwich Observatory in southeast London. This point marks the Greenwich ‘Prime Meridian’, the point from which Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was set in the mid-nineteenth century, and by extrapolation modern international time-zones are measured. The contemporary cartographic and temporal status of this point belies, however, the fact that there have been, and still are numerous ‘prime meridians’; in Madrid, Mecca, Alexandria, and Kyoto to name but a few. The point here is that GMT is both an objective point of reference, and an international agreement to synchronize baseline time-measurement (along with datelines). It has, however, only become such over the course of time and for particular geopolitical and historical reasons.
This tension between notions of objectivity, the passing of time, and social convention brings us to this worldview’s opposite number; one I shall call the
interpretive-constructivist
worldview (further discussion is in
Chapter 7
). This is based on the working premise that what we observe is not
a priori
to ideas about it or the position from which the observation takes place. This links then to the following rules of thumb in research practice:
- the social world, and sometimes the physical world, and related systems of meaning (how they are talked about) are inseparable from one another
- social practices, institutions, and phenomena are
co-constituted - human behaviour and motivations are not in a one-to-one relationship
- knowledge is partial; science/scholarship also needs
inductive
reasoning - facts and values are inseparable even though they are not synonymous
- complex sorts of theorizing are integral to, not outside of, the object of analysis.
This worldview sees an intricate interaction between the point of observation, the observer, and the observed. This take on things goes a bit further, though, than purely a question of perspective. Where you stand actually co-defines what you see; how you proceed affects what you see. Hence there are not only multiple ways of seeing but also, ipso facto, multiple things that are observed (
Figure 3.3
).
The third worldview comprises various positions along the above spectrum in that it is interwoven with strands of both of the above views. This I shall tentatively call the
critical-pragmatist
worldview. Its neither synchronic nor harmonious working premises have their feet in both clusters above. These include views that research is about
- exploring cultural practices, experiences, and artefacts on their own terms
- examining the ways language and practices create societies and cultures
- uncovering and critiquing injustices as well as misperceptions
- looking at how power is exercised; from ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’
- exposing relations of domination, discrimination, mystification
- locating alternatives rather then reproducing that which is ‘given’ to us
- research is normative by definition; if not then it can be normative in intention.
