Doing Research

Gary Thomas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137605917
• eBook ISBN: 9781350315266
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

This concise and easy-to-use guide provides students with the skills needed for planning and doing research well, whatever their course of study. Short, succinct chapters take students through the process one step at a time, from planning their project and doing the groundwork through to conducting fieldwork, analysing data and writing up their research. It features practical advice and examples from various subject areas throughout, alongside checklists to keep students on track. This is an ideal resource for students of all disciplines, especially undergraduates undertaking a research project for the very first time. New to this Edition:
- Includes new sections on online sources, university procedures surrounding ethics and different approaches to research

PART 1

PLANNING

1	What is research?

research: v. investigate; study; explore; delve into; examine; inquire; seek; look into. n. careful search; systematic investigation aimed at increasing the store of knowledge.

We all do research every day: research is just finding something out. Go to the train enquiries website and look up the time of your train – that’s research. There’s nothing difficult about research.

But when you do research at university something else is involved. The research has to be about something more significant than train times: it’s about finding out something new. You should be curious to find out an answer. In exploring your subject you have to base your inquiry not only on the information you collect, but also on what is already known about the subject. And your inquiry has to be thorough and balanced – in other words, you can’t just find out what you want to find out by ignoring any inconvenient facts that you uncover.

And it all has to be done in an order that lets you build from one part to the next in what I call the ‘five steps of research’.

All this, from beginning to end – from the first question to reading around to conducting your own inquiries ‘out in the field’ – is research.

And why do you need this book? You need this book because students often, too often, begin by ploughing straight into interviews or questionnaires or whatever, without really being sure why they are doing them or what they are going to end up with. Good research design helps you to join the dots and end up with a meaningful piece of research: a piece of research that will get you an ‘A’.

2	Where do I start?

Get a piece of paper and write down:

An idea – about something that interests you, or something that is important to you in your work or your studies. (Don’t worry about getting it perfect at this stage. We will refine this later.) This is what you want to research into.

A timetable. You don’t need much on it right now, just the date you will start and the date you have to hand in your work. (We’ll fill in more details later.)

This will do for now. You have started. Marvellous! You know what you want to research into and you have a time by which you have to have completed your research project.

3	Where do I get an idea from?

Ideas can come from anywhere, such as:

a topic you have found interesting in your lectures

an issue at work or on a placement

an item in the news

something you have discussed with your friends

brainstorming with friends or family.

If none of this works, try:

googling websites of big government departments such as education or health

putting ‘Campbell Collaboration library’ into Google to find hot topics in social scientific research

going through the alphabet to see what topics come up as you go from A to Z. For example, ‘A’ might give you ‘Acid rain’, ‘Autism’ or ‘Assistants in schools’; ‘B’ might give ‘Boot camps’, ‘Botulism and Botox’, ‘Brazil’s street children’ or ‘Behaviour management’; ‘C’ might give ‘Criminal justice’ and ‘Clinical excellence’, and so on. Try it with friends on a long journey instead of ‘I Spy’. Fun!

4	What next?

The beginning is your idea; the end is when you hand in your completed project.

So, let’s fill in the path between beginning and end. Let’s unpack this, which involves getting the bits o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1: Planning
• Part 2: Groundwork
• Part 3: Building a scaffold
• Part 4: Fieldwork: finding the data
• Part 5: Analysing the data
• Part 6: Writing up research
• References and useful sources
• Index