Final post: Complex research

Final post: Complex research

During this course we’ve talked and read about the different steps and tools you need to answer complex research questions. The six different themes can be split into two parts where the first half was about theory and the second half was about methods. The first part was more abstract than the second and thereby harder for me to grasp fully.

We started with what can be seen as the most basic part of why you want to answer research questions. It is because we want to find new knowledge about something and to really be able to answer this questions we need to define what knowledge actually is and also how one obtains new knowledge. That follow-up questions makes all the difference because that is a very hard question to answer once you start to think about it and this hard and rather abstract definition was what we were trying to find during the start of the course.

What is knowledge? This question seems like a very harmless one but it is a question that will lead you to question all of reality. We read both Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Plato’s Theaetetus during this theme and to start off with Kant he argues that we can’t obtain true knowledge. This is because we all perceive the world differently and it is through our perception that we interpret the world and gain an understanding of it. But since the perception of everyone is different we can’t see something with true objectiveness and thereby we can’t obtain true knowledge. Socrates argues in Plato’s Theaetetus that you don’t need perception to gain true knowledge but rather rely on the power of the mind and use pure reasoning to gain new knowledge. To answer what knowledge is it is easier to answer what knowledge is not and a clear definition of knowledge is more or less impossible to make.

During the first half of the course we also talked about theory and like knowledge it is easier to explain theory by explaining what it is not. One of the texts we read was written by Sutton, R. I. & Staw, B. M. (1995) and was called “What theory is Not”. Theory is not data, graphs, diagrams or hypotheses but rather how, why and when something occurs and it’s what binds your research together. We use existing theory to help us answering research questions and in a way we use theory to help us gain knowledge.

After discussing and reading about why we do research and why we want answers to our questions for the first half of the course we switched focus to how we should obtain these answers. There are a lot of different methods to use exclusively or in symbiosis to answer research questions and the ones we talked about were quantitative and qualitative methods, design research and field studies. We also talked about the importance of defining the problem and do the proper preperations for your research before you start.

To describe quantitative or qualitative research methods it is easiest to compare them to each other to see the differences. Benefits of using a quantitative method is that it’s easy to make a statistical test on the data collected because the data is often represented in numbers. An example of this would be to study how many would vote for a specific party in parliament with a questionnaire. However when we want to know why people vote for that party we stumble across one of the limitations of quantitative methods. Trying to answer a question of “why” something occurs/occurred with the use of a quantitative method is extremely hard because for it to be correct the person who makes the study needs to think of all possible reasons to put a vote on that specific party. If you instead use a qualitative research method to answer this question, let’s say as a question during an interview, and you let the person in question answer freely you will get their answer as it is, nothing more, nothing less. The limitations of qualitative research methods are more or less the benefits of using a quantitative research method and the same goes with benefits of qualitative research methods and limitations of quantitative research methods. One good way to minimize limitations of your study is to use several methods and combine both qualitative and quantitative methods. This is not however a way to dodge all limitations, for example qualitative methods are often very time consuming and combining qualitative and quantitative methods also takes a lot of time.

Two excellent examples of when you often use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to try to answer the question(s) of your study is case studies and design research. Design research is an area that is a little different because the aim of that research is usually different than that of other research. The aim of design research is usually to create a product or service and it usually uses prototyping as a method. Prototyping is a qualitative method and it is a great help to pinpoint what flaws your design has.

A case study aims to examine one or several specific situations, cases, persons or similar. One example of a case study would be to study how the people in Greece react towards their government with the economic crisis that is taking place there. You can also use several layers of analysis in your case study and as I mentioned before, several research methods. Case studies can be used either to validate old theory or generate new theory and, according to me, using it to generate new theory is the most exciting one. You can use a case study to generate new theory about future research fields and an example of that would be if half the population turned into robots. Then you could do a case study on one of the robots to study what and how to further study all of the robots.

To summarize this course I feel like I’ve learned a lot about knowledge and theory that will be applicable in my future studies such as my master thesis. I didn’t think I would learn as much as I did about knowledge and theory however I also thought I would learn more about research methods than I did during this course.