Research Methodology

In last week’s posting I discussed the difficulty of establishing your conclusions. It is a good idea to reflect on this aspect before you start your investigation. Without such reflection, there is a danger that your investigation may not be as useful as you hoped.
The result of your reflections will become a section of your thesis called “Research Methodology”. In it, you will set out what your primary research intends to achieve, and how you will go about it. For example, if you plan to conduct a survey, this section will consider how extensive the survey needs to be, who should be selected to participate, and how to avoid bias, ethical problems etc. If you plan to develop some theory, this section will consider what evidence might encourage people to believe that your theoretical contribution will be useful.
There are some general approaches that have been found to be useful over the years. It often saves a lot of time if you can simply characterise your methods as following one of these standard patterns. There are also subject-specific habits: scientific disciplines, by and large, prefer “quantitative methods”, which involve measuring things and aim at quantitative predictions or formulae. Many quantitative methods involve constructing experiments, to try out some technique in controlled, and possibly well-understood conditions.
For example, if you want to establish the usefulness of a formula which computes something (a dependent variable) in terms of some input variables, it is very convincing if an experimental design manages the find some way of keeping all but one of the input variables constant, and exploring the dependency of the result on the remaining one. Few scientific disciplines really offer this as a practical methodology: the input variables are rarely independent, and there is always a suspicion that the dependent variable depends on some other factors which have not been taken into account.
Social sciences, media studies etc, are often comfortable with “qualitative” or narrative-based methods. These work well in situations where everybody understands that things are more complicated than we can imagine; nevertheless we hope that by focusing on some aspects of a situation, and describing it in a particular way, we can exhibit some characteristic behaviour or responses that may be useful in aiding our understanding or developing policy. In this case, we would hope to find corroborating examples that could be analysed the same way.
The quantitative/qualitative divide is rather a simple and crude one however, and there are several methodologies that are in a sense orthogonal to it: these are:
The scientific or hypothetico-deductive method, developed by Francis Bacon (c1610) and William Whewell (c.1850). Following extensive analysis last century by Karl Popper (c.1950), Thomas Kuhn (c.1980), and Paul Feyerabend (c.1980), its current version is more practical than the one suggested by either of these proponents. If you use this method, your research methodology section can be quite short. (It is normal practice to cheat, and refine your hypotheses as you start gathering data.)
Action research, developed by Kurt Lewin around 1944, views the researcher as intervening in a problem situation and learning from the effect of their interventions on the situation and how it is viewed.
Grounded Theory, developed by Glaser and Strauss in 1967, is a radical approach in that the researcher tries to elucidate the concepts and problematic from the evidence in a four-stage process, keeping the prior theory to a minimum.
All three of these methodologies can be used in both qualitative and quantitative approaches. But they are really impossible to mix.