Getting Started on Research

Rebecca Boden, Jane Kenway, Debbie Epstein

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781473946187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

Getting Started in Research is for people in the earlier stages of development as a researcher. In contrast to the many books available on techniques of data collection and analysis, this volume deals with the many other practical considerations around actually doing research - such as good ways to frame research questions, how to plan your research projects effectively and how to undertake the various necessary tasks.

 

1	Who should Use this Book and How?

 

The purpose of this book is to help you know enough about the research process to get you going and to establish a research career. If this is the first book in the Academic’s Support Kit that you are reading, then you may find it useful to read ‘Introducing the Academic’s Support Kit’ before you read any further.

This book will be especially useful for you if you are in any of the following categories. Someone who:

 

• Is a research student of some sort.
• Has had an academic job for a while but who has not yet managed to get going on research.
• Is in their first academic job (with or without a research degree).
• Has made a career change and has recently become an academic.
• Is a casual (sessionally or hourly paid) teacher in a university who would like to develop an academic career in the fuller sense.
• Has already done some research but who is not entirely confident that they have got the hang of things yet.
• Is a more experienced academic who is mentoring someone in one or more of these categories.

This book is not meant for contract researchers, who will, inevitably, be working to someone else’s agenda, though they may also be wanting to do their own work and would find the book useful for that purpose.

You may:

 

• Want to develop a successful academic career as a researcher or a teacher-researcher.
• Feel and/or actually be under tremendous institutional pressures to develop a research profile.
• Be someone who is genuinely inquisitive, self-driven, and who really wants to do research for its own sake.

Whatever, you are likely to be ready to go but may not be confident about how to set about it. Many good academics are compulsive over-achievers who nonetheless feel surprisingly insecure and ambivalent about their own achievements. Anxiety about research is therefore an extremely common phenomenon. We have lost count of the number of highly successful academics who constantly feel as if someone is going to ‘find them out’ for being ‘inadequate’. This book should help you to acquire some good basic knowledge and to cope better with these common feelings of inadequacy.

In many disciplines it is common for people to become academics as a second career after time spent working in a profession of one kind or another. In others, it is more likely that you will have progressed directly, or with a very short break, from undergraduate studies to a postgraduate degree and then an academic job. Whatever your background, you may be surprised to find that you already have many of the skills and personal attributes that you need to become a successful researcher. If you have become an academic after a period as a professional, many of the skills and competences that you have had to develop and deploy in your everyday working life will be incredibly important and useful. If you are a continuing student, with no professional work experience, you will have recent and relevant study/research skills.

Some of the relevant skills for successful research that you might already have acquired in whole or in part are:

 

• Curiosity and an enquiring mind.
• The ability to read, digest, summarise and synthesise complex material.
• The capacity to work with others to achieve your goals.
• The competence to grapple with complex technical issues and techniques.
• Enthusiasm for seeking out new challenges without feeling (too) intimidated.
• The ability to organise yourself and manage your own work.
• Good problem-solving, observational and communication skills.

In any case, successfully developing your research will require some strong personal motivational forces. These can include:

 

• Working on something that can sustain your interest over a long period.
• Doing research on something about which you feel passionately.
• Feeling that your research work can really make a difference in whatever way is important to you.

If you can’t identify any of these forces, or any like them, then think again about what you want to research or indeed whether you really want to do research. For many academics, research is the thing that really makes their job worthwhile. Conversely, doing research that you do not enjoy can make you extremely miserable.

Finally, we’d like to introduce you to some people who are in the kind of position we think would lead them to find this book useful.

Sasha’s first career was as a senior nurse and she had been very successful in her work. She had enjoyed her part-time masters degree, for which she had received a distinction. Consequently, when she was approached to apply for a post in health sciences at the university where she had done her masters, she leapt at the chance to become an academic. Soon after her appointment, the government audited research activity and she was not deemed to be acceptably research-active. At that point, this was not a particular problem as she was such a new academic. Over the next few years she found that she had little time and less support to become research-active. In her department there was a clear line drawn between the higher-status researchers and the lower-status vocational teachers. Although she kept trying to do research, she gradually gave up hope that she would ever be able to achieve the standard required. As you can imagine, by this time her confidence was shattered.

John had worked successfully as a lawyer for a number of years before his wife died, leaving him with sole care of his young children. He took on a teaching post at a local university because it enabled him to combine working with his childcare commitments. He joined a department with quite strict divisions between those who taught and those who did research. The then head of department told him that he should concentrate on teaching and ‘not bother his head with research’. He did as instructed and, for ten years, was an exemplary teacher. The policy of the university then changed and John came under increasing implied and overt pressure to become research-active. However, he had so completely excluded himself and been excluded from the research culture that he simply didn’t know where to begin. His sense of personal well-being and happiness at work were severely disrupted.

Mukesh had been a teacher of French in a university for a few years when the head of department gave him a project and forcefully suggested that he should do a PhD in the area. At the same time, he advised Mukesh never to do research in anything you were not interested in because you would never finish it. Mukesh did indeed complete his PhD, but the exercise left him with little passion for or real skill in research. This, combined with the arrival of two children in swift succession, meant that he failed to pursue a research career after completing his PhD. As the higher education climate changed, Mukesh found himself under increasing pressure to commence research again, but found it psychologically difficult because of his previous experience.

2	Getting Going: Developing Research Ideas

In this chapter we discuss the question of what academic research is and how to begin to establish your own identity as a researcher. In particular, we look at the thorny question of what you can research and how you can choose, formulate and move on from your research questions.

What do you mean, ‘research’?

All kinds of people do ‘research’, either in their private lives or as part of their work. Journalists, police officers, teachers, travellers and tour guides all need to find things out. For instance, the tourist or the tour guide may want to find out about a local church. They might ask local people, the priest, or consult history books, travel guides, parish records, the internet or simply go and look around the church itself. What they probably want is some interesting factual information to be entertained by or to entertain with. This is all research in the general sense, but it is not academic research.

An academic researching the same church would have very different objectives, depending on their own disciplinary perspectives. For example, an ecclesiastical historian might be interested in the role of this particular church in the history of Catholicism in the region, or its role in sustaining religious beliefs and observances in a local area. A sociologist might be interested in the social functions of the church, or its role and power in local culture and everyday life. An economist might be interested in the system of local tithes that sustain church finances and in how it impacts on the local economy. An education academic might want to explore the role of the church in local schooling and the curriculum and churches as pedagogic agents. An English scholar might be interested in the ways in which local churches, congregants and priests feature in the literature of the area, while an art historian might want to study the artworks in the church or the role of Church patronage of artists in developing particular genres or tastes. What all these academic researchers are seeking is much more than the factual information sought by the tourist or the tour guide. The academics want some deeper understanding or knowledge of social, economic, political, cultural or aesthetic life. Their interests are broad and deep and tackle fundamental questions.

So the type of research that we’re talking about is done in order to gain deeper understandings or knowledge, rather than just to acquire information or facts, unlike Charles in the following vignette.

Charles was a non-research-active teacher at a university. He had to go and see his Director of Research for an interview. She asked him for an explanation as to why he wasn’t doing research. He protested that he was doing research. He explained that he ran a business consultancy business in his ‘spare’ time and that this frequently involved him making quite complex research investigations in order to solve his clients’ individual business problems. The Director of Research explained, patiently but through gritted teeth, that such research was not academic research because it only provided individual answers rather than more comprehensive explanations.

In order to get to grips with what research in your own academic field means, you should aim to participate as much as possible in the research culture of your department, university or wider academic community. Read your colleagues’ work, go to research seminars in your department and others, go and talk to people whom you know to be active researchers and read widely. In this way, you will begin to get a feel not only for what is going on, but also for what is interesting in your area and for what it means to be a researcher.

What can I research then?

Almost any social, political, cultural, economic or aesthetic phenomenon, issue or problem can be the subject of academic research in the wider social sciences and humanities. The key thing is not what it’s about, but the way that you approach the issue. If you are looking for a subject for your research the best thing to do is to develop a real sense of curiosity about how the world around you works or let yourself be open to ideas, objects, experiences or events (current or historical).

Sometimes you might read something or hear something that you disagree with so profoundly that you decide to research the area yourself. At other times, you might hear or read something that sparks your interest and catches your imagination. One of Rebecca’s colleagues recently railed to her about students who came to see him asking, ‘What should we research?’ He had been in the supermarket that morning and noticed that a cleaning product called ‘Jif’ had been renamed ‘Cif’ as part of a global rebranding exercise. He argued that something as simple as this brand name change could be used as the starting point of research on all aspects of globalisation, including global capitalism, branding and marketing.

Some people will have an area of technical or professional expertise that they can build on to develop their research interests. But your initial interest in something is likely to result in a research project that is sustained by your own curiosity and passion for it. Once you have identified a broad area, think about how you can use your technical or disciplinary knowledge to focus on this subject to develop real understandings.

An important part of the process of developing your research topics and ideas is your reading of the available literature. Starting to dip into it at this stage should provoke your interest and curiosity, help you formulate your ideas further and start to engage you in argument in your area.

Vivienne was registered for a PhD in history at an Ivy League university in the USA. Her original proposal was to do with the historical developme...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing the Academic’s Support Kit
• 1 Who should Use this Book and How?
• 2 Getting Going: Developing Research Ideas
• 3 The Research Process
• 4 Doing your Project
• 5 Moving on: Developing Yourself as a Researcher
• Further Reading
• Index