Planning the Research

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Planning the Research
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• Where to Start
• The research proposal
• Basic elements of research design
• Planning and overplanning

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• The proposal should address
• What the proposed research is about
• What it is trying to find out or achieve
• How it will go about doing that
• What we will learn from it and why it worth
  learning

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• These can be seen as requiring you to
• Formulate a research question / problem
• Identify the purposes of the research
• Identify the research methods

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Formulating a Research Question
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• Purposes of Inquiry
• Exploratory To find out what is happening, to
  seek new insights
• Descriptive To offer an accurate portrayal of
  persons, events or situations
• Explanatory To explain a situation or problem
  (e.g. identifying relationships, patterns between
  phenomena)
• Emancipatory To create opportunities and the
  will to engage in social action

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Identifying the Methods
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• The issue of method usually involves two
  inter-related but distinct questions
• What methods (i.e. techniques and procedures) do
  you propose to use?
• What methodology (i.e. strategy or plan of
  action) governs the choice of methods?

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• Identifying the method (e.g. case study analysis,
  participant observation, interviews and
  questionnaires, focus group, space syntax
  analysis, text and image analysis) is important.
• However the choice of method should be grounded
  within broader research strategy as a way of
  justifying your choice. It should also include an
  understanding of the implications of the research
  strategy.

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• For example, ethnographic study involves the
  assumption that
• the shared cultural meanings of the behaviour,
  actions, events and contexts of a group of people
  are central to understanding the group (Robson,
  2002 188)
• In addition
• Central to the way in which ethnographers think
  about human social action is the idea that people
  construct the social world, both through their
  interpretations of it and through the actions
  based upon those interpretations.(Hammersley,
  1992 44)

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• A methodology may also be implicitly linked to a
  wider theoretical position (e.g. feminism,
  Critical Theory) and to an epistemology which
  might be open to challenge.
• An epistemology is a theory of knowledge. It
  answers questions about who can be a knower
  what tests beliefs must pass in order to be
  legitimised as knowledge what kinds of things
  can be known (Harding, 1986 3)

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• However
• Avoid the temptations of overplanning. Your plan
  should be flexible enough to accommodate
  revisions, because
• You may come to revise your initial research
  questions.
• You may discover something that forces a revision
  of your initial assumptions (If you dont, it
  suggests you are not learning from your research
  or being sufficiently reflexive)
• You may come across another research question
  that you find more interesting than your original
  question
• You may encounter external factors that prevent
  you from doing what you first planned

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• References
• Hammersley, M (1992). Whats Wrong with
  Ethnography? London, Routledge.
• Harding, Sandra (1986) Feminism and Methodology.
  Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
• Krathwohl, D (1998). Methods of Educational and
  Social Science Research An Integrated Approach.
  New York, Longman.
• Locke, L et al (1993). Proposals that Work.
  London, SAGE.
• Popper, K (1980). The Logic of Scientific
  Discovery. London, Hutchinson.
• Punch, K (1998). Introduction to Social Research.
  London, SAGE.
• Punch, K (2000). Developing Effective Research
  Proposals. London, SAGE.
• Robson, C (2002). Real World Research. Oxford,
  Blackwell. 2nd edition.