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Part I Concepts and Philosophical Issues Informing Research Designs
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Chapter 1 Setting the Scene in Educational Research
Jon Swain
Box 1.1
Overview of chapter
This chapter includes:
- A statement of the bookās main objectives.
- A discussion of some of the decisions affecting a research design, including practical and emotional considerations.
- An introduction to the authorās PhD research and some of the issues involved in its design.
1.1 Introduction: What this Book is About and Whom it is for
To reaffirm what I wrote in the Introduction, this book is set in the field of education and is about designing and conceptualising doctoral research, including devising an appropriate methodology, which is the theory about the methods and procedures involved, including philosophical insights. It is primarily aimed at doctoral students who have already begun their research projects but it will also be of interest to students thinking about taking a doctorate, as well as tutors, supervisors, lecturers and researchers.
The first section states what the main objectives of the book are and tells readers that many of these are based on a typical core research training course for doctoral students at a particular and prestigious London university, and doctoral students will take similar courses in the vast majority of universities and other institutions throughout the world. The next part considers decisions affecting the research design of a doctoral thesis in general, including the practical and emotional considerations, and the final section discusses the design of my own PhD (Swain, 2001) and some of the processes and issues involved. Many of the themes and decisions concerning my own design will reappear throughout the succeeding chapters (particularly Chapters 2 and 3).
Taking a doctorate can also raise a number of hopes and fears but should be a transformative experience, and the opening three chapters also set out to try and capture this experience of uncertainty that many novice researchers feel.
The research training course
The research training course that I led at my own university, UCL/IOE (University College London, Institute of Education), was called Conceptualising and Designing Research (CDR), and is still part of the core research training, albeit in a slightly different format. During my time as course leader, CDR had a number of presenters who were researchers working in their particular specialised field. Typically, each tutor/researcher began their session by introducing and raising issues about the key principles of their particular research design, and then used their own research project(s) as a vehicle to ground it in the real world with real life examples. In this way, students were introduced to different designs and types of research and evaluation, and were able to position research in its wider historical, political and social contexts. The four classic research designs that CDR and this book cover are case study research, ethnography, experimental design and survey design, and the book also considers mixed methods research. This is not to suggest that there are not many other research designs, such as action research, but there was only space on CDR, and in this book, to consider a few major designs. It was also the case that only a few doctoral students at UCL/IOE used these other designs for their research, at least during the years that I was leading CDR.
Main objectives
In addition to focusing on the different research designs, the main objectives of the book are:
- To critically examine a broad range of major research designs.
- To raise awareness about the nature of knowledge and being in research and to introduce some of the key language that underpin these debates.
- To develop studentsā expertise in formulating researchable questions.
- To increase studentsā understanding of terms such as āmethodologyā, āconceptual frameworkā and āprinciples of selectionā.
- To make students aware of the role of theory in doctoral research.
- To highlight a number of ethical considerations that are involved in research.
- To highlight the processes involved for students in constructing a research design and some of the main challenges involved.
- To view research in its social, political and historical contexts.
- To give students an opportunity to reflect on and discuss these broader issues in the context of their own work.
1.2 Hopes and Fears and Practical and Emotional Considerations
As we will see throughout this book there is a wide range of approaches to educational inquiry (Dowling and Brown, 2010; Robson, 2011; Thomas, 2013; OāLeary, 2014; Punch and Oancea, 2014) and, like myself, each student needs to decide what kind of researcher they are, wish to be, or want to become. Perhaps they like to sit at a desk and analyse quantitative statistics, or maybe they like to go out into the world and spend time with people. Of course, research can involve both these activities.
One way to think about research is that it is a method of inquiry that will add knowledge to a field of practice, or activity, that is currently unknown (Dowling and Brown, 2010). Some of the main considerations that you need to think about, and decide upon, and which will be further discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, are listed in Box 1.2.
Box 1.2
Decisions affecting the research design
- What do you want to find out?
- How are you going to find it out?
- Whom (and how many people) are you going to involve?
- Where are you going to do the research?
- When are you going to do the research?
- How long do you think the research will it take?
- How are you going to make sense of, and present, the data?
As well as these choices, which will affect the conceptual design, there are, for most of us, a number of more practical and sometimes more emotional decisions to think about (see Box 1.3).
Box 1.3
Practical and emotional issues and decisions
- Changing the person you are and the way you see the world.
- Doubts and the emotional effects on self and close personnel.
- Time.
- Money.
- Access to the research setting.
- Ethics.
Like all good educational teaching and learning, taking a doctorate can, or should be, a transformative experience and many students will reach the end as changed people, and see the world in a very different way. Thus, many students, including myself, find that taking a PhD or an EdD is a metaphorical journey that affects their personal identity, because you are putting your reputation on the line, and this theme will be explored in more detail in Chapter 2 (Section 2.9). I can remember sitting in the first training course meeting involving the other 100 or so MPhil/PhD students in my cohort, looking around and thinking how clever some of them looked and sounded, and wondering whether I belonged here and whether I was going to be able to ācut itā. It was a step into the unknown and what would happen if I found out that I was not up to being able to work at doctoral level? I also remember my first tutorial with one of my supervisors to receive feedback on my first piece of work he had asked me to write. As I stood waiting outside the room, my heart was racing in anticipation and I was thinking about the possibility of him saying that he was sorry but this work was not up to a suitable standard.
Studying towards a doctorate needs time and is generally going to take over your life for a few years, and so it is vital that you are passionately interested in your research, otherwise you are going to find it extremely difficult to complete (Phillips and Pugh, 2010; Murray, 2011). A lot of life events can happen over these years and you also need to be prepared for the downs as well as the ups. Studying can sometimes be lonely and you may find that few friends outside the university1 are interested in your research. It can also be more difficult for partners or close associates, particularly for part-time students, because it is the weekends and holidays that need to be set aside for study, rather than for going out and enjoying yourself. I am not saying that finding the time is impossible, it is just that it is more difficult, and you need to be prepared for it and give a lot of thought to how you are going to organise your time for study.
Gaining funding for a doctorate has gradually become much harder over the last few years and the majority of doctoral students are self-funded, especially those taking part-time doctorates. Some part-time students decide to reduce their professional working hours in order to set aside one or two days a week for study and this has financial implications for themselves and their partners/families.
Another consideration that many students carrying out empirical research need to think about is gaining access to research sites to carry out their fieldwork. I was able to use my professional teaching contacts to gain access to the schools I used for my fieldwork but many students will not have these connections or networks and getting beyond gatekeepers can be difficult. Although the studentās institution (including their supervisor) will often help, this problem can be exacerbated for international students whom are unlikely to have personal contacts and may also have less understanding of how systems and organisations work.
Finally, students will need to think very carefully about the ethical implications of their research and, depending on the area and type of research, this can be a long and difficult process. These issues will be discussed in much more detail in Chapter 5.
1.3 My Own PhD Research Study
Like many people who decide to study for a PhD, I first took a masterās (in Education). At the time (around the early 1990s), I was a deputy head teacher in a junior school and it was difficult to study and carry out my teaching and managerial duties at the same time. Studying was usually confined to weekends and holidays and, as I have mentioned above, this was quite tough on my partner, who was also a school teacher and, quite rightly, was looking forward to spending some of her free time going out together. Having caught the bug of doing research, around two years later I began to explore whether it was possible for me to take a PhD or an EdD2, which was a new doctoral programme aimed at working professionals researching at their own institutions, that was being set up around this time. By now, I had decided that I did not want to be a head teacher and at first I intended to leave my post as deputy head teacher, work in local schools for two to three days a week, and work on a PhD for the rest of the week. However, after a year of beginning my doctorate, I was fortunate enough to gain funding from the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC), which made my life considerably easier and made if possible for me to become a full-time student.
I knew that I wanted my research to be connected to my job and my professional experience, but I was not sure what area or theme to explore. Although my masterās research about bullying at school had used mixed methods, I always enjoyed spending more time in environments such as other classrooms, observing and learning about what was going on, and meeting and talking to people of all ages, rather than on my computer crunching statistics. So...
