One of the great things about writing
about research methods,
is that methods are the thing that unites an otherwise divided academic community.
As academic researchers, we all have our individual research topics and interests,
and the community of other researchers operating in the same field as us is relatively small.
Yet the need to design robust
research projects, choose appropriate methods,
analyse our data and construct
appropriate arguments, theories or hypotheses,
is a challenge that unites us all.
So whether we're studying the causes of the First World War, rates of illiteracy in adults or children,
antimicrobial resistance in hospitals, or the impact of sport on national identity,
we need good research methods.
So writing about research methods is our one big chance to write to that much wider community
of academic researchers around the world.
That means many of the things that we write, whether that's a methodological paper or a methodological book,
could have a much bigger audience than perhaps many of the other things that we'll write as academics.
It also means though, that when we're thinking about our audience,
we do need to be aware of this wider community that we're writing for,
and we need to find ways of being meaningful when we're writing about our research
to a community of readers who may not share our research interests.
|Okay, so my focus
throughout this video will be on
practical writing strategies that you
might wish to consider in your own writing.
I'm not concerned with issues of research design, methodology, epistemology, things like that -
I want to keep it practical and give you some narrative devices
that you may or may not wish to use or think about in your own writing.
If you want help with issues of methodology, epistemology, research design,
I suggest you look at some of the other videos on the NCRM site,
and look at the wider methodological literature.
So as a PhD student, your task before you write anything,
before you even plan your methodology chapter,
is to first of all visualise your likely examiners.
What will they need to know? What won't they know?
What will you need to explain to them and justify?
This way, you will hopefully find a way of writing the chapter
in a way that is not you explaining for yourself,
the methodological decisions that you've made,
but you explaining, warranting,
contextualising and justifying
those methods for your examiner audience.
|Now, if you are writing a method section in a typical research paper,
let's say it's a data-based paper, or an empirical paper,
your audience is obviously quite different to that of a PhD thesis.
Obviously you are writing for your peer reviewers, who are the gatekeepers of your research paper,
but you're also writing for a wider audience beyond that.
That's likely to be interested academics who are active in your field,
and also probably PhD students who are doing research in related areas.
Again, the task that faces you in writing your methods section,
is to visualise what those people want to see,
and need to see, from your methods section.
The challenge here is, and let's be honest, the method section for many people
is not the most interesting part of a typical empirical paper.
Your job is not to hang around too much,
but to give enough information so that your arguments, your theories,
and the things that you say about the
research problem more generally,
make sense in the context of the methods that you have chosen.
Now, we would contrast this with a methodological article.
That is to say, an article which is about issues of methods or methodology,
rather than about issues to do with a more empirical research problem.
What's critical here when you're visualising your audience,
is from forms of methodological writing, and this applies to methods books and chapters too,
your audience is much more wide-ranging than it will be for your own research area,
and the things that you might write about in that research area.
For instance, if you are a criminologist, it's probably a good bet that it's other criminologists
reading your empirical research papers.
But, if you are a qualitative researcher
who happens to be a criminologist,
the audience for your methodological article is going to be a whole range of other qualitative researchers,
not just in criminology but in related social science areas.
You need to understand that as your audience, and adjust your writing accordingly
Typically when we're considering writing a research methods paper,
there are a number of different things that you might wish to consider
that could become the core of that article.
For many people, it's exploring a new application of an existing method.
So for instance, you're using a particular form of online surveys,
and you're the first person to apply online surveys to a particular problem,
in political science, for instance, or in geography.
Or you could develop a new critique of an existing method.
You've used critical discourse analysis in this way,
and you've understood that it has strengths in this aspect and weaknesses in this direction,
and you wish to share that critique with a wider methodological audience.
It could be that you wish to refine or engage with methodological theory,
that can be the sort of historical theory that exists in the literature,
or you may wish to push theory, the way we talk about methods, that little bit further forward.
And increasingly, and particularly in fields of using technology in research,
we may wish to unpack a further refinement in method, or a new innovation.
For instance, you may be using participatory methods and using mobile phone or cell phone technology
to actually add a new dimension to your
data gathering and your data storage, for instance.
So the point normally is to have something new or unique to say about methods.
So crucially, the point is to understand that your audience is much more wide-ranging
than it would be for the more empirical forms of writing,
that you would normally experience when writing a research paper.
|Now I'll come on to the challenges that face authors of research methods books or textbooks, or chapters a little bit later.
So to repeat: good research writing, and
particularly good methodological writing,
is not about you at all - it's about them, the audience.
And so your challenge is to take them by the hand and explain to them the decisions that you've made,
the methods that you've used, understanding that they were not there while you did your research.
This is a core concept.
Many of us, when we're writing, of course, are writing from experience.
We are writing in the context of our own memories - of having done the research,
of having carried out an interview, for instance, or conducted an experiment.
Within that corpus of memory are all kinds of assumptions -
'I don't need to talk about this', 'I don't need to talk about that', because it's obvious -
but of course, if your readers weren't there when you were doing your research, it may not be obvious to them.
And so it's absolutely critical when you do your final edit of anything you write about methods,
that you subject that work to the question of:
Would somebody who wasn't there when I did my research understand everything that I did,
and all the decisions that I made?
|So, having established the kind of existential points that you're not writing for you but writing for others,
I now want to look briefly at a number of kind of principles and strategies
that you may wish to consider using in your own writing about methods.
The first one, and this is really one of good housekeeping, in terms of research practice generally,
is to consider writing about methodology
from day one of your research.
What this allows us to do, is to keep everything fresh in our mind.
Effectively, as we go about managing and undertaking a research project,
we are doing a multitude of things each day, we're making a number of different decisions.
It's helpful then to capture not only those decisions themselves,
but the rationale behind making those decisions, as they go along.
If we leave it until the end of a research project, we may well have forgotten
why we did this, or why we did that.
So in a way, this is a means of keeping a writing diary.
The advantage also, is that if you're prone
at all to writer's block,
we are effectively doing very low pressure
writing from ourselves each day.
We're effectively collecting a corpus of
writing as we go along.
That's going to be quite a large body of writing, but what it should do,
is when we have finished the research project, it will give us a range of materials
from which to choose the best bits and then deploy those in our writing.
So if you're keeping a research diary, make sure that the field notes are thorough,
and that you are reflecting and capturing methodological choices each day.
The kinds of things that you need to be keeping a note of are critical research decisions.
You were in a qualitative interview, for instance, and you decided in the middle of that interview
not to ask questions three, four and six.
Why was that? You may forget why that was later on in the process,
but straight afterwards it will be quite
obvious to you, and quite fresh in your mind,
why you are making those decisions
in the midst of your interview.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the key points that it's really important to keep front of mind,
is that your readers weren't
there when you did your research.
Now, this brings me to another principle and that is:
if space allows, it's really important to state the seemingly obvious.
And this is particularly important if you are a PhD student.
|The next principle I want to share with you when writing about research methods
is what I call the idea that no part of methodology writing is an island.
Too often, writers about methods are prone to write in very dry and abstract terms,
and I don't think this is good practice.
What I mean by saying that no methodology writing should be an island,
is it's really key, and enormously helpful, to show some of your findings
and rich context, and rich data, to illustrate your methodology section.
Don't leave all of your data to the more empirical parts of your writing.
Equally, that means that in elsewhere in your thesis, or elsewhere in your book,
you need to be showing something of the methodlogical thinking
to illustrate how you came up with your findings and how you developed your theories.
Making your methodological writing feel less isolated
also involves drawing on some of the methodological literature when you discuss methods.
Don't leave that to a separate section, which we might call a literature review.
Clearly, methodological writing is mainly about method.
But to understand why we did this, or why we did that,
needs to be related back to the wider context of your research problem.
It may be that you opted to talk to a different community,
because the community that you first looked at didn't provide access,
or wasn't actually appropriate for the kind of research problem that you wanted to look at.
Therefore, a change in method is very much rooted in the bigger question of the research problem.
What that means then, is that you should be supporting your methodological writing
with data, quotes, figures and examples drawn from your research experience
that illustrate decisions that you've made.
|I want to give you an example.
Let's imagine in your research project that you're using a survey,
and that the first times that you use that survey, you have come up with your list of questions.
It may be that as you practice using that survey in structured interviews,
that you get a sense that some questions need rewriting,
and some questions need to be taken out
altogether, and others need to be added.
Now, those decisions only make sense
through the practice of doing the research itself.
Now that means that when you come to write about your methods,
and when you come to write about how you
changed your survey instruments,
it makes much more sense, and it's much richer to do so, by drawing directly from the data that didn't work,
or didn't feel right, that you got from that initial survey or structured interview experience.
In that way, we are adding rich material and meaningful context to our methodological writing,
and it makes it all make much more sense
to our readers.
|This we might call the principle of showing, as well as telling,
which will be familiar to many of you who thought about writing fiction as well as non-fiction.
Now this principle of showing, of using real and meaningful examples
to demonstrate the methodological decisions that we've made,
if we want to think about that in methodological terminology,
we would call that the principle of warranty.
This means that it's important to support
each point that we make with some kind of
'for instance' or 'for example', which
acts as a prompt for us to deliver that context,
to deliver something of the real meaningful experience that then informs what could otherwise have been
a dry and over-abstracted account of why we changed this, and why we did that.
|Now, if you're writing a methods book it's important to understand that the task is a little different.
Most people reading a research methods
book are reading that book in order to understand
a new method for themselves.
There, the challenge is not so much using our methodological writing to add power, and justify
and to think about warranting the validity and reliability of a hypothesis, or our arguments.
Here, it's much more about understanding that writing about method is there to help other people
think about using that method for themselves.
We're not justifying research decisions
that we made, we are articulating a rationale
for why other researchers, or maybe students, might wish to adopt the same methodological strategy.
So just as we've established that your readers were not there when you conducted your research,
we also know that you, as an author, won't be there when your future readers
try to apply your guidance to their research practice.
The principle is almost the same.
|The next principle of writing about research methods, is to write about your decisions.
Already in this video, I've been talking about this need at every stage of the process,
and a way of conceptualising the writing task you have, is to see it as an account of the most appropriate
and important research decisions that you have made.
In the course of any research project, you've probably made many thousands of decisions,
most of which are seemingly unimportant, but many of which,
like the decision to use one particular form of data analysis over another,
or the decision to use one location for
your research over a different location,
are absolutely key.
Now your challenge here is to understand and try and work out,
how many of those decisions reasonably you can write about.
In a PhD chapter, for instance, you could have anything between 5,000 words and 12,000 words in that chapter,
in order to give your examiner readers a really good idea of the range of good decision-making
that you made in the design of your research project.
However, in a research paper you may only have a few hundred words,
particularly in shorter research papers, to deal with issues of methodology.
Clearly if that's the case, you can't talk about the kind of range of decisions that you have to make
that you might in a PhD chapter.
Your challenge here is to work out which, are the core one or two decisions that you have made,
that then make the arguments and theories and contribution that you've made to your research problem,
make the most sense.
|The next principle of writing about research methods
is to think about whether you can state and eliminate your alternatives.
Now this is closely related to the challenge of writing about your decisions.
Decisions imply that you had a decision to make -
that there was an alternative thing or process that you could have done.
Is that in your research design? In the questions that you've posed? In the sample that you've identified?
In the community that you've worked with? In the location? Or even in the analytic technique?
If you'd like, a kind of 'off the shelf' method is to take one of the decisions that you've made,
to list the alternatives that you felt were available, whether they were fully valid alternatives or not,
and then to explain why you rejected those particular alternatives.
This is a great way of demonstrating to your readers, particularly if your readers are examiners,
that you're not a one-trick pony,
that you've understood that there's a range of different methodological approaches
and that you've thought about as many of them as is reasonable,
before coming up with a well-warranted decision.
|The next principle when writing about research methods, is to write with openness, clarity and charity.
When we think about charity, what we mean by that is,
when we're dealing with alternative positions and alternative perspectives,
we give them the benefit of the doubt
before we offer our critique.
Openness and clarity are really about full disclosure, about really explaining to your readers
why you have to do this, and why you decided to do that,
without hiding anything from them.
Most academic readers' research material are bright and experienced people.
If there's any sense that you're hiding something, or not being fully honest
about the methodological decisions that you've made, or at least the reasons for them,
they will be onto it, and the credibility of your writing will suffer.
Another good thing to
consider and some types of research and some
kinds of researchers might not want to
do this, is to make a nod to what we
might call situational details. Most of
what you write is going to really cover
formal methodological decisions but
often they're only really understandable
in the context of the practice of the
research. For instance you may be
researching in a location where the
experience of doing that research could
be dangerous, it could be difficult, it
could be hard to find gatekeepers, it
might even be hard to find safe, good
places to conduct interviews or to even
liase with the people that you're working
with. These kinds of situational details
really need to be discussed in order for
your readers to understand why you did
this and not that in your research.  This can
even apply to experimental methods you
may be working for instance, in a
hospital that has this equipment and not
that equipment, and of course that will
lead you to using that type of equipment
and develop that kind of experiment,
rather than something that might have
been available to you somewhere else.
These practical situational details may
often feel prosaic, but can add real
meaning to the readers understanding of
why you developed a particular
methodological design. |Those of you
writing in a quantitative tradition will
often be encouraged to write for
replication, and this is really my next
principle. Now obviously if you're
writing in a qualitative tradition
the whole notion of replication doesn't
really apply to you. So it's up to you to
make a decision about whether writing
for replication is for you or not. If it
is for you the challenge is to give
enough context, enough information and
also to justify the choice of designs
that you came up with, in such a way, that
your readers could go off and repeat the
study. An even better way of thinking
about writing for replication is to
consider writing for improvement and
replication. Not only should you give
your fellow researchers enough
information, enough detail, to repeat the
study themselves in exactly the way that
you did, but you should then also reflect
on how that study might be improved, so
that the academic community can then go
and implement these improvements
themselves. The next principle is really
one to help you in your own writing
decision making. There are so many things
that you can write about when you're
writing about your research methods. The
next principle is if in doubt everything
relates to your research problem. One of
your challenges as a writer is really to
decide what to include and what to
exclude. Now that can be difficult, but
the issue is how does this thing, that
I'm writing about methods, actually speak
to my encounter
with my research problem
and what does it say to my readers about
how I've developed theory or how I've
developed an argument. Now if you're
struggling to answer that question well
or clearly it may be that this is an
indicator that this is something perhaps
less important to discuss, than perhaps
something else. This allows you again to
be more grounded, to write in a more
meaningful way and
be less abstract, and it's also I think
good advice to help you getting,
to help you avoid getting sidetracked down
kind of, avenues of discussion that might
not obviously be meaningful to your
readers, they may wonder why you're there
for instance. |The next challenge is to
consider identity, and again this is a
topic that varies enormously by
methodological approach and also by
discipline. There are some fields of
inquiry where thinking about who you are
as a researcher and the impact that you
might have, isn't really something that's
expected in your research writing.
Obviously, of course many of the social
sciences, the issue of identity is
absolutely key, and the issue of identity
in terms of reflecting and allowing you
to think about how you, yourself as a
researcher have impacted on those around
you when you've conducted your research
is absolutely key. It's another prompt
for your methodological writing. Practically
then, when you're doing your own writing
you need to ask yourself and tell your
readers, and of course be reader focused,
how has who I am as a researcher
potentially changed the questions I can
ask, the way I even think about my
problem, the responses I might get, the
way I interpret my data,
the theories I come up with, and of
course the methods I choose. Reflecting
on these issues is a great prompt to get
us deep into the world of research
methods writing. |Another common approach to writing about research methods is a
kind of chronological approach. Now this
can either be a setting out of the
research project as a journey from A to
B, and a kind of ticking off of the key
points along that journey, or equally
commonly, it can be in the form of a kind
of before and after structure. This is what I did
in my pilot, this was what my hypothesis
was, and this is what I ended up doing.
Either way both approaches lend
themselves to a full discussion of core
research methods decisions and are very
handy ways to structure your own
engagement with method and to structure
and plan your own writing. I would also
encourage you, when you're writing about
methods is to always look for your
unique contributions, the precedence and
the innovations. Now that can sound quite
intimidating. For most of us, we don't
come up with a new research method, we
don't come up with a new research design.
And so I want you to see this as a
challenge for you to think about
precedents, contributions and innovations,
in what could potentially be a fairly
humble way. It could be that you're the
first person to use a particular method
in a particular location, or you could be
the first person to use a well-known and
well tried method using new technology,
particularly as I've already mentioned,
mobile phone technology. It may be that
you've used a particular method and it's
not quite worked for you in the context
of your own research and that's allowed
you to reflect differently on that
particular method. Many of you though, if
you think about it, will have something
quite unique to say about method, and
this is something that your fellow
readers are likely to be extremely
interested in. So if you can identify
methodological innovations, flaunt them.
Are you the first person to ask a
particular question to a particular
group or individual? Are you the first
person to work with a particular issue,
in a particular place or population?
These are all unique contributions.
If you don't have any of these,
particularly if you're writing a
research paper for instance, that could be
a message to you that you don't need to
write too much about method. Those of you
thinking about writing a methodological
article though, should really be focused
on those unique contributions,
innovations and precedents. |The next
point I make could make me sound like a
bit of a new age guru, and this is not
something that, you know, I want you to
think that I am, but I would urge you,
when writing about methods more than
other parts of your research writing, to
view every problem as an opportunity.
Really, difficulties that you have in
making sense of your data, difficulties
that you might have in non-response for
instance, challenges you might have with
negative results or missing data, the
seeming incoherence of it all, are all
potentially prompts for you to write
about. It may not seem like good news but
all of these challenges are ways for you
to tackle issues of methodology, ways for
you to think about where it was issues
of methodology that helped you, or
hindered you, and ways for you to think
about how you might tweak or improve
things next time around. So if you
can bear to, when thinking about writing
about method, every problem that you
faced could be a writing opportunity. Now
with all of this, as I've said, the
challenge for all of us as writers, is
not so much what to include, but what to
leave out. Now if we're writing about
methods in the context of writing about
other elements of our research and
writing about our findings, the question
of how much space to devote to method,
really boils down to a question of what
difference did method make. If the honest
answer to that is not very much, then
potentially the methodological sections
of your writing can
smaller, but if the answer to the
question of what difference did methods
make is everything, in terms of my
theoretical understanding of my topic, in
terms of the developments of my
arguments, in terms of my readers
understanding of what I'm doing here,
then that is your prompt, probably, to
write a lot more about issues of method
and methodology. |Now finally my last
principle is that you should always,
within your method writing, have some
form of conclusion or self evaluation
that's an honest appraisal of what you
did. Now easy ways is to think about this
is how would you redesign your research
with the benefit of hindsight or
potentially with more resources and even
more money. What went wrong? Why did it go wrong?
How would you do it again in the future?
How would you advise other researchers
doing your kind of research, to apply
what you've learnt to their research? So
if you can consider concluding with
honest self-evaluation, it reveals you to
be an open-minded and reflective writer
of method.
