Understanding Research (15 page)

Remembering that our topic, research questions, and rationale are that the dog should be wagging the method/s’ tail, one way to plot a course through these philosophical and methodological undercurrents in a way that makes sense for your project is to leave aside this particular distinction. Make a mental note as you must; acknowledge the predominant research culture you are working within as required. In the meantime work on considering whether the course of inquiry you are working on calls for you to make a start gathering your data and from there applying any particular analytical framework to make sense of your findings.

The five areas below describe core methodological approaches in operation today. They are presented here as a sort of survival guide to help you plot a course in practical terms in light of the various theoretical and practical debates that affect our choice of topic and eventual research question. This overview concentrates on these distinctions as practicalities: (1) ways of gathering data; (2) ways of analysing the material. Note too that these are not mutually exclusive terrains by definition, nor are they synonymous with particular disciplines or schools of thought per se. However, each one also has come to be associated with particular disciplinary ‘homes’; e.g. surveys in election or public opinion research, focus groups for media and communications studies, participation-observation for anthropological fieldwork on the ground or in online settings such as computer games.

Given that there are various worldviews and positions on the ‘What is science?’ question underpinning these clusters at any point where they diverge and intersect, how their respective ‘rules and procedures’ for gathering and analysing the material work is the task of
Chapters 6
and
7
. At present we are getting a sense of the lay of the land as we firm up the research question, make our first plans, and get acquainted with the literature. The highways and byways of this larger terrain include ways of working that can be characterized as
ethnographic, surveying
and
interviewing, archival
and
textual
approaches to documents,
experimental
and
alternative
pathways:

The above coping strategies will start to make more sense as you proceed further into gathering and analysing your material. Let’s review these initial stages before moving deeper into the research terrain.

1. There are general and particular rules of thumb for embarking upon what are commonly characterized as qualitative- or quantitative-style research when not a mixture of the two. It is the execution, respective weighting, and presentation of these elements that are informed by deeper, underlying tensions between underlying worldviews and the way any approach develops and gets institutionalized, or not, over time.
   
2. As we approach the last two chapters of
   Part 1
   where research designs and research divides appear to walk hand-in-hand, I would stress that in order for a project to get out of the starting blocks, we need to make an analytical and pragmatic distinction between how worldviews, research question formulations, and other planning matters impinge on the inquiry and then set our priorities for the time being without undue worry about how the project ‘looks’.
   
3. To extrapolate: rather than pretending that there are methods and accompanying theoretical frameworks that either transcend or can resolve this particular dialectic, or trivializing what are very real power hierarchies at work in terms of which research gets the thumbs up – good grades, public recognition, research funding – or leads to future employment, the best way to cope when these distinctions start to impact on your work is (try) not to panic. Put them off until a later day, take in the lay of the land first or step up to the plate and engage in the big debates, ask these difficult questions of yourself, your peers and your
   supervisors. But at the same time make some initial decisions, strike out on a path. You can review, retrace your steps every so often along the way.
   

Reflect on these matters for sure but do try and keep moving. Ironically, your eventual topic is not
a priori
confined to one sort of method, theory, or broader school of thought. Unless you are doing a research project that focuses on these meta-level or philosophical questions per se (and even then you still need to focus and give shape to them) keep the distinction between these abstract questions and their practical dimensions in mind. This way you can avoid getting too bogged down in a meta-methodological morass.

1
   To recall, the first is mandatory for research-funding bids or applications to Ph.D. programmes. The second encompasses anything from templates to help students along in their planning, a guide for preparing for supervision meetings, to a written document submitted as a piece of work for research skills/methods courses. Some supervisors may expect you to submit a research plan to them in any case.

2
   See the relevant sections in Blaxter et al. (2006), M. Davies (2007), and Gray (2009).

3
   See Gray (2009) and Creswell (2009) for some good discussions on using writing as a way of thinking.

4
   Wise words from my own research office support staff member on submitting a funding bid.

5
   See Berg (2009), Blaxter et al. (2006), Creswell (2009: 129
passim
, ch. 7), M. Davies (2007), Gray (2009).

6
   Creswell devotes a whole chapter to the Purpose Statement (2009: 111–26).

7
   Thanks to Susan Banducci for this reference (personal information).

8
   These terms might be familiar to some of you from studying maths in school, where you learned the formula for a line (Y = mX + b).

9
   This topic fills volumes. For references that have certainly helped me along the way in terms of the way they speak directly to, and from hands-on experiences, see, Fabian (1983), Marcus (1995) and Smith (1999).

10
   As a research subject in a research project where videos played a key role yet not all interviewees wanted to be identified, the researcher filmed only our hands. I have also done work with people who prefer not to be recorded. Others have been happy to be videoed, recorded and named in any citations yet also wish to vet the sections that appear in the final report.

11
   Any funded research these days comes attached with the caveat that an ethics form and committee-based procedure is a co-requisite if not prerequisite for funding.

12
   Material for this and other ethics-related sections are based on my role as vice-chair of my department ethics committee and membership of the university ethics sub-committee at time of publication. My thanks to past and current research students for their permission to be able to draw on their dilemmas and material in these discussions (see also
Chapter 5
). Thanks go out as well to my ethics committee colleague Tim Crook at Goldsmiths, whose legal knowledge and intrepid eye for the practical nuance and limits have taught me much. My own hands-on learning of these matters has also been informed by Helen Lee, Johannes Fabian, and Niko Besnier in particular.