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Pre-master Methodology notes
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A complete summary of class notes for the Methodology course.
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MethodologyScientific Research
Starts with an interest in or question about phenomena, situations, or behavior
- Research questions can be of all kinds.
Finds out what’s already known about the topic
- Literature review: go over methods and its general importance
Provides its own attempt to describe or explain the phenomenon/situation/behavior or tests
and existing description/explanation
- Multiple ways of approaching a description/explanation (worldviews/epistemologies)
May use various types of data to do so
- Different types of research methods (usually tied to the choice of worldview or
epistemology)
So: When should we believe an explanation/description?
- Only if the research is reliable
- Only if the research is valid
- Always provisionally (someone might come up with a better explanation)
Scientists
- Have strict rules to try and guarantee the quality of academic research
- Use theoretical insights to interpret observations.
February 3rd, 2022
The technique of research.
Formulating a (scientific) research question
- Hard to overestimate the importance
- It’s the guide that leads you through your research journey
- It outlines the destination of that journey
- It tells you what you should have done.
A research question is:
1. A scientific question is not a question for which the answer is already known/can easily
be found.
2. A scientific question had better not be a YES or NO question.
3. A scientific research question can be researched.
Examples: Why do people cry?
Pointers:
- A research question is not a question for which you look up the answer.
- Clear definitions of all the parts of your question are necessary
- Questions that can be answered, tend to be specific questions(not underlying, big ones)
- There is often not 1 correct approach (combining approaches, or triangulation)
Main things you need to know:
Approach: objective or subjective?
Perspective: your questions or their answers?
Sample: big or small?
,Data: quantitative or qualitative?
The report: subjective or objective?
Triangulation: use multiple methods providing multiple perspectives to ensure that they have a
good “fix” on a problem.
Starting your research
People have different views about the purpose of research, which shapes their approaches.
Being aware of your own worldview allows you to refine your research questions.
Worldview 1: Nomothetic approach:
(from Greek,nomos = law, thetic = one who establishes)
- Human behavior is generalizable, predictable, and motivated by events, personality,and
other people.
- Understanding behavior is best done by isolating factors. We have to keep all the rest
constant.
Worldview 2: Idiographic approach:
- Each person is unique, unpredictable, and self-motivated
- Understanding behavior is best done from the participants’ perspective and by
considering the whole situation.
It’s not all binary choices:
- More nuanced categorization of worldviews
- Also: research traditions, angles of approach
- And: general tendency in many fields towards more attention being paid to individual and
cultural difference; more awareness of WEIRD (Western Educated Internalized Rich
Democratic) biases.
Smart starting points for research
- Look at real examples of the communicative setting/product etc. that you are interested
in.
- Consider your own (personal) experiences with assumptions and preconceptions about
the topic.
- Map the different stakeholders and relevant factors that you can think of. Take in the
different variables.
- Read existing research literature.
- Define your research purpose (exploration, description, prediction, control, interpretation,
criticism, explanation)
Quantitative and Qualitative research
Quantitative research methods are built around the idea that human traits and behaviors can
be translated into numbers to analyze them.
Types:
- Experiments
- Surveys
- Content analysis
- (Meta-analysis)
- (Computational modeling)
, Qualitative research methods are built around the idea that human traits and behaviors can be
observed.
Types:
- Interviews: one on one.
- Focus groups
- Case studies: one particular subject.
- Observational studies
Induction:
Reasoning from the particular to the general
-Example: Bobby hits his brother after he played GTA. Therefore, violent video games must
cause aggression.
- Theory/hypothesis generation or explanation
Deduction:
Reasoning from what’s general to the particular
-Example: If violent video games cause aggression, gamers will, on average, have a higher
incidence of committing violent acts than non-gamers. (Or:Bobby will be more likely to hit his
brother than Bobby’s non-gamer friend.)
- Theory/hypothesis testing
Abduction:
- Similar to induction
- Inference to the best explanation.
- Bobby hits his brother - What could explain the behavior given the data that you have?
Starting with your research
You must first determine what type of research you want to do. What will its purpose be?
Exploration
Exploration is curiosity-based research. It typically results in descriptions of what you were
interested in. The description may be qualitative or quantitative. In this sort of research it is more
likely to be broad than a specific hypothesis.
Description
Description tends to leave us wanting more - in particular, wanting an answer to the “why”
question.
For example, reporting that women are more likely than men to discuss their grades is
informative but does leave us wondering why.
Explanation
Studies focused on explaining attempts to answer the “why” question. For example, your
observations might indicate that women are more likely than men to socialize over coffee after
class. Interviews done may lead to discovering that more women than men live off campus and
that socializing after class is the easiest way to get group projects organized. Thus, what was
observed is explained in terms of housing status and meeting face to face as a preferred way of
getting work organized.
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