Understanding Research (16 page)
Read Understanding Research Online
Authors: Marianne Franklin
Living with and defending your choices during the lifetime of a research project has not only formal but also social and personal dimensions to it; implicit and explicit levels of accountability which underpin how we are thinking and going about the research. Researchers express these expectations in a number of ways: categorically (for example, basing a decision on the ‘facts and figures’),
normatively
(for example, noting something missing in current knowledge that should be covered, arguing how the research serves notions of social justness), or as strategically placed references to
publicly available literature (for example, individual publications, statistical databases, White Papers, news reports, or
blogs
) in the narrative.
In all of the above researchers will also quote others directly,
verbatim
or by alluding to publications. These are the most prevalent ways of anchoring our work in what others have done, or are currently doing in our topic-area; the formalities and etiquette of academic citation. Direct quotes, allusions, and paraphrasing are where scholarly hierarchies and peer networks are made visible in academic production; recognized or resisted in various measures in any written report of a research project. This is the power exerted on our work by the so-called
canon
of any given field of endeavour as well as the diffuse pressure of everyday sensibilities about whose work we think is relevant for our project. Dealing with who others think are more relevant is part of the politics of research.
The larger process entailed here, however, is one through which researchers gain familiarity and then come to terms with what others have to say, or not, on their topic and its wider context. This is what your supervisor and teachers are talking about when they refer to the ‘literature’. It is also why many supervisory sessions are punctuated by names, references to debates, and references to specific publications.
These expectations – and obligations – often only crystallize at those moments when we have to present work to others or find ourselves having to defend a decision made and its, perhaps unforeseen, consequences for our findings. Learning how these technicalities work within respective methodological, institutional and geographical settings is also what makes academic research so exacting; tedious at times and at worst an exercise in name-dropping or intellectual versions of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’.
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Such moments occur almost from day one; explaining changes in our research plan or inability to tighten up the research question to our supervisor, elucidating aspects of a Ph.D. dissertation queried by the examiners, in the Q&A after a presentation to our peer group. For first-timers, dealing with direct challenges to key decisions made early on can be a disconcerting process, particularly if you cannot come up with any let alone a satisfactory response; either through nerves or, worse still, because of ignorance.
The point here is that whether still in the planning stages or when completed and bound, ready to be disseminated to a wider audience, how we see our project in terms of work done or being done by others is pivotal, requiring different levels of commitment, selectivity, and written expression. It also involves some deft manoeuvring through the material for projects that draw on more than one disciplinary literature (for example, ethnography and literary analysis, politics and media studies) or where supervision is also shared between approaches.
For example, if your project is in psychology broadly speaking, there is a distinction between finding out and then discussing how your research question relates to research done by others on a similar issue-area or even the same topic; within or across the various approaches now making up the larger ‘field’ of psychology and its subfields, for example, behaviouralism (see
Chapter 7
) or psychoanalysis. How these overlapping domains – those closest to your inquiry in particular – relate to comparable work done by sociologists or anthropologists is another. Which insights from other domains are pertinent, as well as which are not, may well be something you need
to explain and defend in itself, particularly if your topic and approach counters the mainstream line of thought in your setting.
Below I will touch on some of the issues around the way inherently multi/ interdisciplinary projects, and so literature bases, create both openings and risks. Suffice it to say that in these cases the ideal of work that draws on and addresses multiple readerships involves a trade-off between depth and breadth of coverage, independence and allegiance. Many postgraduate, and not a few undergraduate dissertation students working in mixed or recently merged departments, become acutely aware of these undercurrents, often feeling duty-bound to ‘pin themselves down to one discipline for career purposes’ at a very early stage.
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To set the scene, the first section looks at how location plays a part in the sorts of research undertaken today in an ostensibly globalized context; international master programmes, interdisciplinary and cross-border collaborative research projects, or research seminars create exciting sorts of synergies and also heighten differences in approach and sensibility. The next section takes a brief look at the philosophical and historical dimensions to these geographies, intrinsically Anglo-Euro-American academe. The core of this chapter unpacks what is meant by literature searches (a process) and the
literature review
(the product); both terms denote a certain sort of research activity – how we relate our work to one or more literatures.
In formal terms, for dissertation work at any degree level, these levels of expected and acquired knowledge converge at two moments in the research process: the preparatory reading – and writing – you do early on in a project, and writing it up in the final report (see
Boxes 2.1
and
3.1
). In everyday conversations, between supervisors and dissertation students especially, these two phases tend to become synonymous; referred to as the
literature review
.
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Given its strategic role in research design (see
Chapter 3
), the writing up of the research (see
Chapter 8
), and that way you as well as others identify with your project, this chapter aims to help you understand how this element works in academic research in three interconnected ways.
- As part of familiarizing yourself with the form and substance of the discipline, or disciplines, in which you find yourself or choose to work; location – orientation – matters. As researchers we develop a sense of where our work is located; cognitively, institutionally, and geographically; how disciplinary borders influence the research process, where they matter and where they can be bridged.
- As part of the mandatory requirements for successfully presenting a completed piece of research for degree programmes, which is quite specific; a chapter or section in the final report. This requirement arguably puts the
literature review
at the epicentre of the research project. Whether you undertake a systematic or a more selective sort of ‘lit review’ the point here is that you can show you have got to grips with the main debates (and key thinkers) in your area. In that sense
as part of the research process, reviewing the literature is important for helping you formulate a research question and furthering your work-plan. - Distinct from doing a literature search, the term ‘lit review’ and its intertwined relationship with the theoretical component of a project is also a piece of written work in its own right; a mandatory element in many UK dissertations for instance.
Undertaking and then presenting literature reviews is an important resource for learning to live with, and reasonably defend our choices. It also implies that the researcher, absolute beginner or old-timer, can appropriately acknowledge sources (in formal citation formats, through allusions to, and engagements with themes or thinkers). That we know the difference between our own ideas and those of others, and can engage with those others in a reasonable way is where we test our mettle (see
Chapter 8
).
This brings with it protocols, so before returning to how research communities also create and carry certain identities, we look at more formal skills, technical matters related to how we need to treat the work of others. Whilst being original (see
Chapter 2
) is the aim, as researchers look to generate new knowledge, both unfold in the context of knowledge and foresight of others. There are rules and regulations about how researchers acknowledge and cite the literature. The chapter goes on to consider:
- 4 The basic principles of academic citation and referencing; more details to follow in
Chapter 8
. - 5 The question of
plagiarism
: why presenting other people’s words, or research results as if they were our own is not acceptable. This term encompasses a range of transgressions, some more clearly defined than others; for example, from claiming a concept is all your own when it may already be in circulation, to ‘tweaking’ a text to avoid using quote marks (once again), to ‘lifting’ chunks of text
verbatim
from other sources without full acknowledgement of the source, inclusion of quotation marks, or too much use of quotes instead of your own words.
As with previous chapters, which aspect of the discussions below need attention first as you work to put
your
research into context, and figure out why, is up to you in the final analysis.
As a student working toward a particular degree, you may proceed with assignments, essays, and even the final research project without stopping to think more deeply about the nature of the discipline you are studying in: for example, what is the key object of study in politics, media studies, or sociology? What drives these fields; what types of questions are important for researchers? To a large extent we as students and researchers just get on with it. However, these types of questions ask us to think about the discipline we are working within, or against (as the case may be). They also affect
the sorts of research we embark upon, certainly in terms of our first major pieces of independent work.
The research process is intimately connected to these discussions about the discipline; therefore, what is new about doing research now is also a story about the development of the discipline that can go way back. Let’s take two examples, politics and history. Commentators date these disciplines in many different ways, some as far back as the writings of the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, Thucydides, and Herodotus. In the first instance, Plato is accredited with being the first political theorist and Aristotle the first political scientist; Thucydides the first international relations scholar, and Herodotus the founder of historical method. Plato, in
The Republic
, was concerned about formulating a model for a utopian society, which would take into account many of the problems endemic to living in society. Aristotle, on the other hand was interested in the design of political institutions based on observations of how a society operates. It has become commonplace to see Plato and Aristotle as representatives of two divergent ways of drawing conclusions from the (observed) evidence; the implications of these two paths for how analysing our findings will be explored in
Chapter 7
.
The point of this detour into how the ancients have come to occupy foundational positions in institutional differences in undertaking research and then presenting the results is to highlight the undertow of millennia of reiterated assumptions about the correct
savoir faire
in which all researchers find themselves as they embark on a new research topic (see
Chapter 2
). All disciplines, and constituent methodologies make allusions to these founding fathers [sic] accordingly.
Another way to get a sense of the development of a discipline is to look at the professional associations that have emerged. Not only the historical conditions, but also the geographical and cultural parameters of the first associations can tell us something about both their ‘genetic code’ and the way they develop as part of any disciplinary ‘genealogy’ (see Foucault 1973). For instance, political science is considered as an American enterprise. One of the first professional organizations was the American Political Science Association (APSA) founded in 1903. Despite the name it has an international reach with members from over seventy other countries. International relations by all accounts is considered as a British discipline, its origins dated from the first chair in international relations in 1918, named, incidentally, the ‘Woodrow Wilson Chair’, after the 28th American president, in Aberystwyth, Wales. That said, the International Studies Association (ISA), based at the University of Arizona (USA) was founded in 1959 to promote research and education in international affairs. It currently has over 4,000 members in North America and around the world. A comparable set of overlapping associations, with or without the appropriate use of the term ‘international’ for US-housed associations, is in media and communications; the International Communications Association (ICA) is based in the USA with spin-off associations such as the International Association of Media and Communications Research, Association of Internet Researchers, and nationally-based or regionally-organized academic associations presenting various methodological predilections and preoccupations likewise.
Both quantitative modes of empirical research and the predominance of
formal theory
have come to be strongly associated with American political science, communi
cation studies, a large part of sociology, and their professional associations (the APSA, ICA, and ISA respectively). Continental Europe and the UK, with their own distinct blends of approaches, represent different academic cultures. Here we see that some of the above ‘American’ approaches have been adopted whilst in other cases associations identify strongly with Anglo-European traditions; the British International Studies Association (BISA) for instance is where an ‘English school’ of international studies is strongly represented. In addition, British universities appear uneasy with the American adoption of the term ‘political science’.
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Despite the different names – political science compared to international studies – in attending the annual conference of either of these large professional organizations there is a great deal of overlap in the range of topics and methods used; the quantitative–qualitative divide developing all sorts of cross-cutting inflections accordingly.
As students and professional researchers take part in these associations and related events, we all learn how location in the figurative and literal sense encompasses disciplinary, national, and financial parameters which enable and encroach on our research paths in varying degrees: intellectual and emotional allegiances, professional networks, and job opportunities follow, more or less. As noted above, the two largest international professional associations related to politics and international relations do not necessarily exclude topics or methods from outside their respective ‘mainstreams’, referred to as
malestreams
by feminist critics (see Carver 2004, Shepherd 2009, True 2001). Even though the term political science is not used in the UK in the same way or same extent as in Europe and the United States, the divide does not always correlate to the Atlantic Ocean, or the Channel for that matter. There is considerable mixing and overlap, so it is too simplistic to suggest here a one-to-one match between the US and quantitative forms of empirical research methodologies, with the rest of the world bringing up the rear so to speak. Within geographical and methodological locations there are shifting mainstreams and their detractors.
This brief excursion into academic institutions and geographies is simply to alert the reader to how these larger histories, ones that predate your project or your entry into academe, form the literature. Given that the objective of this book is to equip readers with the skills to navigate these different approaches at their points of contact and friction, then the point here is to suggest a way to read other writers as researchers undertaking the same task as yourselves; making their point and claims to a particular audience, if not against one. If the aim is to employ techniques that work for the research question at hand then this awareness can assist you in persevering when the going gets tough, when underlying fissures that mark any disciplinary and professional tradition may open up under your feet.
Time now to get down to the practicalities of getting to know which literature, amongst all that is potentially available for any project, is pertinent to your inquiries; which you need to account for as part of the aforementioned kinship structures, and which are specific and indispensable to your project. And to know why.