Understanding Research (38 page)

To sum up: for practical purposes, and to avoid getting too bogged down, this chapter has treated
analysis
as a moment when the researcher needs to take time to think – pause, contemplate, (re)consider – and then make decisions as they get down to their respective analytical ‘business’. The chapter has treated analysis as follows:

• As the moment in a research project when we need to consciously and methodically look at, study, and (re)consider accumulated data on their own terms.
  
• Some talk about this phase being about letting the data ‘speak’ to you. As mystical as that may sound, what this really boils down to is moving into a new level of decision making, even confusion. This is because the material does not entirely speak for itself, no matter how badly you wish it did. Some translation and transposing needs to take place as you set about sorting, re-selecting, and sifting what you have gathered, observed, listened to, or read.
  
• Cross-checking that the results before you are valid, no errors have been made or underlying parameters incorrect; for example, mistaking a dependent variable for an independent one, and vice versa, making sure your arithmetic is correct, ensuring no key item in the policy selection has been overlooked.
  
• Achieving a reasonable to excellent degree of analysis comes with getting to grips with the material close-up, as it ‘presents’ itself to you. For example:
  
  • taking time to read, or re-read interview transcripts, looking at – studying – the figures (if not checking them again);
    
  • looking more closely again at an image or film sequence or applying a particular way of looking at this material, for example, frame-by-frame, time-sequence breakdowns, sorts of shots used, soundtrack/musical scoring and other mechanics in the montage;
    
  • ‘close reading’ of selected passages in key texts alone, or alongside others, for example, applying Derrida’s notion of
    deconstruction
    to parts of the canon;
    
  • applying a pre-given or tailor-made coding scheme (concept/keyword-based or more interpretative) to the selected material (for example, policy archives or media messages);
    
  • drawing inferences from the maps or diagrams you have produced, either manually or with software (for example, Invivo results as tables, Issue Crawler maps of web-hubs requiring interpretation as well as legends).
    

Granted, the particular methodologies covered here treat the gathering and analysis of material as inseparable. De-linking analytical interventions from the process of
formulating a research question or written forms of contemplation and argumentation may, for some readers, smack of empirically reductionist (read
positivist
) notions of social inquiry; diametrically opposed to more philosophically or culturally inflected (viz.
critical
) ones (see
Chapter 3
). However, this implies that research carried out in arts and humanities departments disregards such distinctions on principle. Whilst some claim to do so, others, although eschewing terms such as
data, evidence
, or
findings
, do articulate a definable object of inquiry and interrogate the matter in a methodical way, albeit from within particular worldviews and idioms about how best to apprehend the phenomena under investigation: physical, symbolic, or ideational.

There is, I would argue, still a distinction to be made between these moments along a research path; each of which are distinct from what we are doing when embarking on the writing-up phase. This chapter has looked at key analytical interventions along the divide in terms of the way texts are understood and then studied: as quantifiable units of content, or as complex carriers of meaning. In effect, whilst these discussions underscore the divide as introduced at the start of the book, in practice we can see how their various rules and procedures and underlying world-views, particularly when transposed into online, web-mediated research settings, also reposition this divide.

The main argument underpinning these discussions is that the mechanics and philosophies making up various sorts of methodologies where analysis features by definition are often overlooked and hurried through, wrongly subsumed under either data-gathering rubrics (
Chapter 6
) or as a self-explanatory element of the writing-up phase (
Chapter 8
). Granted, all three moments overlap one another; as we generate or gather, and then sort out and consult our data we are already making inferences – drawing some sorts of conclusions if not being challenged by the unexpected as we assess what counts and what does not count as significant to the inquiry. Gathering, engaging with, and writing up the research are all activities that entail ‘analysis’; the concrete and the abstract are both implicit in this term, which is why it is so over-used and so under-elucidated. It is a name for physical and abstract research practices, larger methodological labels. But it also invokes a verb in that researchers also ‘do’ analysis.

1
   Many undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations do make use of secondary sources; how well and to what end depends on the research question. I would simply note that if a particular thinker is so important to your project then it would be remiss not to have some sort of first-hand experience of reading the relevant parts of their work.

2
   For instance, the fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie after the publication of his book
The Satanic Verses
, the Catholic Church’s outlawing of the book published by the astronomer Copernicus in which he proposed a heliocentric model of the cosmos and subsequent indictment of one of its prominent advocates, Leonardo da Vinci. Or, more recently, the growing rift within the Anglican Church over the rights and wrongs of openly homosexual clergy, in the UK and abroad. In all cases, conflicting interpretations – analyses – of holy scriptures and extant knowledge of how the physical or social world does or should work are at stake.

3
   These sections take us into philosophical and theoretical literatures that are not only fascinating but also very dense; inseparable from contentious worldviews and positions on the ‘what is science?’ questions (see
Part 1
). I have consciously steered away from ‘tagging’ the points below with Big Names and Big Ideas. Not because I find them irrelevant or uninteresting. Far from it. However, the primary task is to activate independent thinking and enable decision making along a road travelled. Moreover, most readers are pretty well-versed in these issues, theoretical and technical, and the literature well established and evolved enough for a full rehearsal of these issues to warrant separate attention beyond the scope of this one chapter.

4
   A current example from political communication and the study of rhetoric: the rise and election of Barak Obama as president of the United States in 2008 brought with it public and academic interest in his oratorical prowess; like his role-model, the civil rights activist Martin Luther King, this includes looking at not just how his speeches are written as literary and persuasive devices but also at their, now famous, delivery: pauses, reiterations, climaxes in volume and pitch. Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, and one of her admirers, Tony Blair, are also examples; for example, note the conscious use of triplets such as Blair’s ‘education, education, education’.

5
   Two examples: (1) coding according to the ‘nearest neighbour’ principle, e.g. young boys and anti-social behaviour; (2)
Cognitive Mapping
(Abdelal et al. 2009: 7–8).

6
   Thanks to Pasi Väliaho for access to teaching material in this section.

7
   Thanks to Julian Henriques for this expression.

8
   In particular semiotics is a particular form of linguistic analysis defined by both its rigorous, systematic approach to the text; see Scolari (2009), Williamson (1978)

9
   These are the terms used in many of the history of science’s major polemics. It is beyond the scope of this book to critically discuss the sociocultural dimensions of how western pundits place these terms on the ‘wrong’ side of the divide between ‘science’ and ‘non-science’, ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ knowledge.

10
   This citation is taken from one of websites linked to the BBC TV series
Sherlock
, based on the Conan Doyle character, updated for young twenty-first century viewers and entitled
The Science of Deduction
(
www.thescienceofdeduction.co.uk/;
accessed 20 June 2011).

11
   See Canales (2009), Chalmers (2004), Haraway (1990), Harding (1998a,b).

12
   See the Wikipedia entry on just this point: ‘Methods of Detection: Holmesain Deduction’ at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes-Methods_of_Detection
(accessed 20 June 2011).

13
   For a classic rendition of what is regarded as the ‘mainstream/malestream’ notion of scientific method, watch the YouTube clip entitled
The Key to Science
showing the physicist Feynman Chaser teaching a class at Cornell University in 1964;
www.youtube.com/watch?v=b240PGCMwV0
(accessed 20 June 2011).

14
   Thanks to Zlatan Krajina for this nuance; space does not permit more commentary on the implications of this distinction.

15
   Thanks for Zeena Feldman for this insight. For those more convinced that their way is the best way, see note 13 above. In the clip, Chaser maintains that if the evidence produced by an experiment countermands the hypothesis then it is the hypothesis that is wrong; the evidence has ‘falsified’ it. What other commentators note is that such clarity assumes that the experiment, in terms of design and execution, is beyond reproach.

16
   For example, see Burchill et al. (2001) for a range of approaches forged in the ‘Third Debate’ in international relations.

17
   The differences between psychological models of human behaviour at stake here are vast. Suffice it to say that they rest on just how far what is observed, or observable to the investigator is related in turn to the sorts of interpretations or inferences drawn from these observations; recall the Sherlock Holmes example above. Another example: Freudian psychoanalytical models of human behaviour based on unconscious drives and how these emerge as a ‘psychopathology of everyday life’ diverge sharply from those based on innate
neurological features of the human brain. The nature versus nurture debate permeates these differences.

18
   The Economic and Social Data Service (ESDS) is a national data service providing access and support for an extensive range of key economic and social data, both quantitative and qualitative, spanning many disciplines and themes. ESDS provides an integrated service offering enhanced support for the secondary use of data across the research, learning and teaching communities;
www.esds.ac.uk/

19
   For instance, David Farrell and Roger Scully’s (2007) study of British MEPs makes use of qualitative data archived at the ESDS.

20
   Thanks to Susan Banducci for providing this example and her input into this discussion.

21
   Sex/gender verification tests currently involve gynaecologists, endocrinologists, psychologists and internal medicine specialists.

It will not have escaped the reader’s notice how integral the act – techniques, craft and for many the art of writing is to successfully completing a research project. Academic writing, in a research environment and for scholarly consumption, has particular formalities, stylistic and professional idioms and skill-sets that also merge and diverge from more individualistic notions of personal ‘style’ or authorship. By the same token, the notion and reverence for authorship in academe is still alive and well despite influential critiques of any notion of ‘the author’.
¹
Such distinctions and how they are rendered as evaluative criteria, for examining and peer-review purposes,
underscore disciplinary boundaries, fuel debates according to changing trends in research cultures and their respective writing conventions (for example, pronoun use – ‘we’ versus ‘ I’; role of notes, degrees of citation). Students too often have a number or preconceived ideas about what it means to write
academically
as distinct from writing ‘journalistically’ or ‘creatively’.

Students embarking on a major research project with working experience, journalists in particular, bring with them well-developed writing skills, an ability to work to deadline (in principle) and within a set word-limit. Others come with blog-writing, PR, and/or creative writing experience. Others with experience in the private sector or NGO work may well be able to put together an executive summary or policy-brief statement at the drop of a hat. All these skills are important in that they entail an ability to write in certain ways, for certain audiences, with respective aims and formats. It is when being asked to write more ‘critically’, or ‘analytically’ and not ‘just descriptively’ that uncertainty can set in. Not just because academic writing is seen to be, and in many ways is distinct from these other genres and working practices. But because academic writing includes a number of specific skill-sets that are peculiar to this enterprise: formatting and compiling literature lists, footnotes/endnotes, citation styles, presentation formats, argumentation conventions, and vocabulary. Research students coming through from undergraduate programmes may also find themselves challenged to improve techniques acquired as they went along, or adapt academic writing skills to accommodate other formats.

Currently the influence, generally seen as a negative one, of computer-mediated idioms such as email, blogs, micro-blogging, and the increased reliance on powerful web search engines on writing and thinking standards have been the focus of research attention and popular debate about the implications these have on younger generations (see
Chapter 5
). Given the predominance of the written word – longhand – in academic research and teaching for legitimizing the production and dissemination of knowledge,
writing
a dissertation is no small matter (see second section,
Chapter 2
,
Box 2.1
). Criticisms of our writing at any point can be tough; not only a personal matter but also embedded in disciplinary if not localized institutional norms about what constitutes the most appropriate organization and style for an academic piece of written work. Given the range of views on what counts as coherence, clarity, accessibility in any literary genre, the first point to note at this stage is that, as is the case with non-academic discussions in these matters, what counts as ‘well written’ is a contentious category within and across the divide.

Second, students often ask ‘when is the right time to start writing my dissertation?’ Although discussions about this aspect of the process usually come towards the end, writing has been taking place from Day One of your project. Depending on the disciplinary and geographical context in which you are working, you may find that mentors and supervisors regard the act of writing as synonymous with doing research itself. In philosophical and literary-based approaches, this is indeed true; for example, the literature review/theory chapter is considered in many UK institutions as a crucial, formative piece of writing quite early on; producing chapters as part of progressive coursework is also seen as indispensable to assessment regimes and feedback sessions. Producing an outline or formal research proposal is one piece of completed work, writing up fieldwork notes or survey results (along with the requisite graphs, tables,
or interview material citations) another; handing in a ‘methodology chapter’ as coursework for methods seminars a distinct piece of work again.

Third, why still this overwhelming emphasis on the written word, particularly in a multimedia and visual age? As you may recall, the ‘literature review’ elements (process and product) covered in
Chapter 4
is all about getting to grips with written texts. Completing a dissertation satisfactorily therefore also includes writing up the work in order to present it to an academic audience; first stop usually being the examiners. From research reports, through to dissertations through to journal articles and books, the written word is still the primary form in which academic research and the knowledge produced ‘goes public’. However, a research project can also go public orally; as part of an official defence (Ph.D. level but in some parts of the world, at M.A. level as well), or in a conference/research seminar paper presentation. Nonetheless oral presentations are usually based on a written document, a paper, or PowerPoint presentation, now
de rigueur
in academic research and classroom settings.

For dissertation work, the writing-up stage has its own peculiarities and challenges. Even the most experienced researchers can find their best-laid research planning coming apart, certainties fading, and research question wobbling in the face of large amounts of material, or countermanding evidence that defies attempts to make written – narrative – sense of it. What to leave in, take out, which initial ideas need reviewing – or rejecting, which initial questions require revisiting, can be a daunting prospect. However, it is this transition – if not transformation – of inchoate data (however defined, for ideas need refining too) is the
sine qua non
of academic research; findings and their analysis – or if you prefer, interpretation presented in formal written formats; the inclusion of multimedia, visual, and performance presentations dependent on the sort of degree.