Research Methods

The Key Concepts

Michael Hammond, Jerry Wellington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429603402
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book provides an overview of ninety key concepts which often trouble those who are new to researching within the social sciences. It covers theories of knowledge, methodologies and methods. Each entry offers a definition of a concept, shows how researchers have used that concept in their researchand discusses difficulties that the concept presents. The book supports those undertaking their own social research projects by providing detailed critical commentary on key concepts in a particularly accessible way.

In exploring these concepts, a wide range of research reports across many different fields are described. These include not only classic accounts, but also a broad selection of recent studies, some written by new researchers. The book will be useful for higher-education students carrying out projects within social science faculties at the end of their first degree or during a master's programme, though it will also be helpful for those undertaking doctoral research, and some entries have been written with the production of a thesis in mind.

This second edition of Research Methods: The Key Concepts provides a more comprehensive and up-to-date coverage, as old entries have been updated and 19 new entries added. It helps new researchers to navigate the changing landscape of social research by recognising a) the changes in the ways researchers are thinking about knowledge and acquiring knowledge, b) the increasing use of digital tools to collect data, andc) the desire many contemporary researchers feel to promote social justice through their research.

THE KEY CONCEPTS

Access

Access involves gaining entry to people, to places, to organisations or to documents. Access is negotiated in advance but gaining access is not a one-off process; access may be extended as trust is developed, for example if the researcher’s presentation is seen as appropriate and ethical guidelines are being followed. Access to people in organisations is invariably facilitated by key informants who can help explain the context in which the organisation works and guide the researcher in developing a suitable observation or interview strategy.

Clearly, access in some contexts is unlikely, for example few researchers will be able to gain access to presidents and prime ministers or leaders of industry, or be able to observe decision-making in ministries or within global conglomerates. However, access may also be a difficulty in more everyday contexts. In many countries, for example, access to schools is only granted after checks have been carried out and access to prisons (at least for research purposes) is understandably time-consuming (Schlosser, 2008). Underlying restrictions on access is an unwillingness to expose organisational practices to public scrutiny alongside deep-rooted ethical and practical concerns. At times there is a culture clash between researchers and their good intentions, and ‘gatekeepers’ with particular concerns for their own organisations and justifiable fears of seeing it misrepresented.

Many new researchers often feel under considerable pressure in carrying out research as the problems of access are often under-reported (Peticca-Harris et al., 2016). In fact unrestricted access is likely to be difficult if not impossible to achieve and this can seriously affect the design, planning, sampling and carrying out of research. Researchers will worry that they have failed to gain access to enough informants or that they may have been denied observation of key events. However, all the researcher can do is to make reasonable efforts and consider the significance of any gaps in data collection: research is the ‘art of the possible’ which is why opportunistic or convenience sampling feature so commonly in real-life contexts.

There are some who argue that access should be gained covertly in some contexts so that the researcher pretends to play a role in order to minimize ‘reactivity’ or the observer effect. This is easy to do when researchers access open public spaces, though this still leaves dilemmas as Li (2008) discusses when describing how she withheld her researcher identity when visiting casinos in order to study female gambling culture in Canada. Covert participant observation raises more questions. Examples of covert research are numerous; one notable case is Goffman (1963) who carried out research into asylums in the USA by taking on the role of an assistant athletic director. There have been examples of covertly accessing neo-fascist organisations, and, in another example, Maguire et al. (2019) discuss the challenges they face as three researchers, who respectively identified as lesbian, gay and LGBT ally, in covertly observing heteroactivist organisations. In recent years much attention has also been given to studying Internet spaces, for example signing up to dating sites in order research user strategies and contacting ‘essay mill’ providers in order to study academic cheating (see Medway et al., 2018).

In all of the preceding examples the case for covert access seemed to be on the grounds of uncovering what should not be hidden: cheating in universities, the allure of discriminatory politics, what goes on inside institutions. However, each is unsettling, and academic researchers seeking to carry out deep covert observation are likely to encounter challenge or flat refusal from ethics committees.

References

1. Goffman, E. (1963) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
2. Li, J. (2008) ‘Ethical challenges in participant observation: A reflection on ethnographic fieldwork’, The Qualitative Report, 13(1): 100–115.
3. Maguire, H., McCartan, A., Nash, C.J. and Browne, K. (2019) ‘The enduring field: Exploring researcher emotions in covert research with antagonistic organisations’, Area, 51(2): 99–306.
4. Medway, D., Roper, S. and Gillooly, L. (2018) ‘Contract cheating in UK higher education: A covert investigation of essay mills’, British Educational Research Journal, 44(3): 393–418.
5. Peticca-Harris, A., deGama, N. and Elias, S. (2016) ‘A dynamic process model for finding informants and gaining access in qualitative research’, Organizational Research Methods, 19(3): 376–401.
6. Schlosser, J. (2008) ‘Issues in interviewing inmates: Navigating the methodological landmines of prison research’, Qualitative Inquiry, 14(8): 1500–1525.

Action research

Action research seeks to address social and professional problems through an iterative cycle of action and reflection. The term ‘action research’ itself is often seen as first used by Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) in work on citizenship in the 1940s to describe a participative style of research which would lead to social action. Action research was later taken up as a form of practitioner enquiry focused on an attempt to improve practice through a systematic cycle or cycles of planning, doing and reflecting. For example, action research became important in the field of education with the work of Carr and Kemmis (1986) highly influential; in a much-quoted definition they envisaged action research as a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of these practices, and the situations in which the practices are carried out (Carr and Kemmis 1986: 162).

Action research has widespread appeal and projects are carried out by practitioners within many different fields including community activism and development, citizenship, professional learning and product design. A flavour of the breadth of this work can be found in examples such as Frey and Cross (2011) who attempt to promote educational rights among young people living in extreme poverty in Argentina; Stylianou and Zembylas (2018) who implement changes in the classroom to help their children be better supported when suffering bereavement; Khanal et al. (2018) who conduct action research to help mountain people in Nepal to adjust to social and ecological changes; and Foth and Brynskov (2016) who discuss participatory design and action research in creating new civic technologies.

Action research is popular because it has the considerable advantage that it seeks to directly improve practice for the better. Repeatedly action research has been seen as making a difference in ways that more conventional research does not. It avoids top-down implementation of unsuitable policies and practices, and proposes a more flexible, bottom-up, iterative approach: we do not know all there is to know when first introducing an innovation, we need to adapt in the light of experience. However, the researcher new to action research faces several challenges. These include:

• How to describe the process. At heart those carrying out action research are asked to ‘plan, do, reflect’, but several quite elaborate frameworks have been produced on the back of this simple injunction. These frameworks try to provide workable guidance for keeping the researcher on track while recognising that the process of action research is iterative, flexible and ‘messy’. There is no easy way to balance guidance with flexibility and no agreed model of action research for new researchers to take. Indeed any framework will need to be adapted to particular circumstances.
• Addressing both problem and opportunity. Traditionally action researchers have sought to address social and practical ‘problems’, but this limits the application of the process. Many projects are better described as taking advantage of opportunities, such as those provided by new technology, or, better, having elements of opportunity taking and problem solving.
• Assessing the quality of an action research project. Most action researchers will reject or re-interpret traditional notions of validity and reliability and perhaps talk of theoretical and methodological robustness, value-for-use and building capacity (Elliott, 2007). Others may evoke trustworthiness and have a particular interest in ensuring their research is ‘interconnected’ to the experiences of research participants. In assessing the quality of their projects action researchers will consider how they can feed back the insights they have gained to practitioner and other non-academic audiences, within and beyond the context in which the research took place.
• Balancing the trade-off between understanding and doing. Bogdan and Biklen (1992), for example, saw the aim of action research as the ‘collecting of information for social change’, and at times action research may focus more on exposing the limits on change rather than introducing innovations which have very little chance of success.
• Keeping action research critical. Some, both within and beyond action research communities, see action research as largely ‘technical’ in scope – offering quick-fix solutions to problems without considering the moral context in which the research is taking place or the imbalance of power and influence within an organisation or practice. Critical action research in contrast, considers both means and ends, and interrogates all courses of action on both moral and practical grounds. A tradition of participatory action research takes an explicit ethical commitment to work with oppressed groups in a society, sometimes drawing on the ideas of participative pedagogy advanced by Freire (1972) (see on this entries on critical theory and decolonising methodology).
• Making action research collaborative. Collaboration is often considered necessary in action research in two respects: collaboration between peers, on the grounds that it is not possible to understand, let alone change, a situation by oneself, and collaboration with outside agents, often academics, who have greater experience of the process and can provide a stimulus and support for enquiry. Some argue that action research needs to be collaborative if it is to go beyond the normal course of everyday problem solving and if change is to be sustainable. This raises challenges. The action researcher needs to enlist collaborators, when such collaboration may not be forthcoming, and to negotiate equitable and productive relationships with outsiders.

Action research offers an opportunity for a bridging between theory and practice, resulting in desirable, sustainable change. However, critics of action research question the capacity of ‘lay’ researchers to undertake and report research and their willingness to participate in systematic enquiry given its time-consuming nature. Critics further point out that most academic accounts of action research are written by outsiders working in close cooperation with participants rather than participants themselves. They also question whether findings can be generalised adequately. Researchers using the term ‘action research’ need to be aware of these criticisms and be able to identify tensions in their own research. In practice some action research reports assume there are agreed methods and procedures for action research, when there are not. Some projects reported as action research are better understood as case studies as they are reporting practice and innovations from the outside; some are better described as experiments, in which the researcher has been minded to follow a course of action in advance of any reflection on practice. There is an added confusion as other terms such as ‘reflective practice’ and ‘action learning’ are used to describe approaches which are very similar to action research. Finally the action researcher needs to know his or her audience or audiences when reporting. There is an important distinction between the wider academic community, interested in generalising from a project, and one’s collaborators who may have a strong emotional engagement with the project and a concern for its practical outcomes.

References

1. Bogdan, R. and Biklen, S. (eds) (1992) Qualitative Research for Education, Boston MA: Allyn and Bacon.
2. Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. (1986) Becoming Critical. Education, Knowledge and Action Research, London: Falmer Press.
3. Elliott, J. (2007) ‘Assessing the quality of action research’, Research Papers in Education, 22(2): 229–246.
4. Foth, M. and Brynskov, M. (2016) ‘Participatory action research for civic engagement’. In: E. Gordon and P. Mihailidis (eds) Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5. Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
6. Frey, A. and Cross, C. (2011) ‘Overcoming poor youth stigmatization and invisibility through art: A participatory action research experience in Greater Buenos Aires’, Action Research, 9(1): 65–82.
7. Khanal, R., Chettri, N., Aryal, K., Poudel, S., Kande...