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b Research Approach
What is your intended general research approach, style and method (Max 200 words)
Problem Solving
The majority of students have only a superficial grasp of problem solving and usually this is expressed in just Brainstorming. There are 5 basic problem solving strategies: trial and error, top down, generic (have I seen something similar before), changing viewpoints and lastly looking for relationships. It follows that each research method is constricted from one or more of these.
Research Method
These are problem solving frameworks or models (survey, case study, vignette, experiment, action research, etc) that are useful for various kinds of primary data research effort. The actual choice is never easy but it is useful to recall that in research, we usually have a basic purpose: understand something, explore something, describe something, explain something, improve something, build something or prove something.
It follows that depending on one’s basic purpose a particular Research Method will present itself. However, there are many other factors: context, time available, skills available, practicalities, access to data, what kind of outcome you want, cost, quantitative/qualitative, scale, control, sensitivity of the data and so on. As a simple summary we might best guided by knowing the following principal links where we might say that the research method is good at generating the basic purpose.
Case Studies - understand
Vignettes - explain
Action Research - improve
Experiments - prove
Surveys - describe
Grounded Theory - explore
When assessing what a student says here, be mindful that their understanding is usually precarious at this stage and so they will often be irrational. For example, they will say ‘I am taking action in my research to do X, therefore my method is Action Research’ or ‘I am looking at historical data so my method must be Biographies’ and so on. They will be looking for a algorithm here, a simple route to a decision and unfortunately there is no such possibility so staff need to be as helpful as they can but also sympathetic.
Research Styles
This idea is really about the data and in general, data might be broadly classified into qualitative (words, descriptions, pictures etc) and quantitative (numbers, values, counts etc). In research one does not always quite decide this at the outset; it becomes obvious once you know what primary data you are looking for.
Thinking Approach
Most students will have heard of induction and deduction (there is a third way called abduction but we shall not discuss it) and indeed it is easy to find definitions of them but they are quite subtle concepts. The importance of this element is that it helps define what primary data you want and later how the collected data will be processed. Basically, if one is deductive that implies you have a firm theory and so the primary data that you want is very clear as the whole rationale is to get data that seems likely to support your theory. In contrast, if one is inductive then one is less certain what data is needed, waiting for it to be collected hoping that one is then able to draw useful inferences from it.
Primary Data
This is data that is collected by a student at some point in time and therefore the resultant set of data is original. Notice, that in this short definition there is nothing about what will be done with the data, how it’s to be collecte