How to Do Your Research Project How to Do Your Research Project A Guide for Students 3rd Edition Gary Thomas SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483 © Gary Thomas 2017 This edition first published 2017 First edition published 2009. Reprinted 2009 (three times), 2010 (three times), 2011 Second edition published 2013. Reprinted 2013, 2014 (twice), 2015, 2016 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959223 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4739-4886-0 ISBN 978-1-4739-4887-7 (pbk) Editor: Jai Seaman Development editor: Collette Wilson Assistant editor: Alysha Owen Production editor: Katherine Haw and Ian Antcliff Copyeditor: Richard Leigh Marketing manager: Ben Griffin-Sherwood Cover design: Shaun Mercier Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India Printed in the UK Contents About the author Preface Acknowledgements About the companion website How to use this book 1 Starting points: your introduction Question: Where do I begin? Answer: Begin at the beginning, with an introduction Who cares? What is the point of this research? Thinking of a research idea Purposes of research Moving on to research questions Kinds of question – and some nutshell-sized studies and their implications Does your question demand a descriptive or an explanatory answer? A research question – or a hypothesis? Coming up with a question Is it feasible? Problems with research questions Prima facie questions Kinds of evidence and kinds of answer A title What research is – and what it isn’t Overview Further reading Checklist 2 Preparing: project management, ethics and getting clearance Understanding the structure of your dissertation or thesis Drawing a timeline Just look at those fingernails! Time management Stresses in doing research Working with your supervisor The importance of being ethical Getting clearance – ethical review What to think about in considering ethics Access Overview Further reading Checklist 3 The literature review Primary and secondary sources Quality of sources Your literature review should tell a story – it should not be a list Making it a story Speed reading and taking notes Critical awareness: be your own Jeremy Paxman Click on ‘Search’: finding information Reference managers Hints on searching – separating the wheat from the chaff Understanding how sources are cited – the Harvard referencing system Taking notes and quotes Overview Further reading Checklist 4 Decide on your question – again Seeing the wood for the trees From storyboard to storyline Your final question Theory Overview Further reading Checklist 5 Methodology Part 1: deciding on an approach Research design Research approach Frameworks for thinking about the social world – paradigms Paradigms and research approach From purposes, to questions, to approaches, to data gathering Overview Further reading Checklist 6 Methodology Part 2: the design frame What is research design? Some general issues in design Sampling Variables Reliability Validity Experimenter effects Generalisation and generalisability Positionality Triangulation The design frames Action research Case study Ethnography Ethnomethodology Evaluation Experiment Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies – and surveys Comparative study No design frame Can I mix design frames and methods? Postmodernism How to structure and write your methodology chapter Overview Further reading Checklist 7 The right tools for the job: data gathering Tools and methods Be creative Data-gathering tools – mainly for use with words Interviews Accounts Diaries Group interviews and focus groups Document interrogation Using social media to gather data and to collaborate with other researchers and participants Data-gathering tools – for use with words and/or numbers Questionnaires Observation Gathering image-based data Data-gathering tools – mainly for use with numbers Measurements and tests Official statistics Overview Further reading Checklist 8 How to analyse and discuss the information you gather Analysing words Coding and constant comparative method Network analysis Construct mapping and theme mapping Grounded theory Thick description Discourse and content analysis Computers and verbal data analysis Sociograms In-betweenies: words to numbers and developing a coding frame Analysing numbers Kinds of numbers Eyeballing Using Excel to do your data analysis Statistics that describe Statistics that help you understand a relationship between two variables Statistics that help you to deduce (or infer) Discussing your analysis Organising your discussion – alongside or after the analysis? Synthesis vs analysis Drawing out ‘theory’ Overview Further reading Checklist 9 Concluding and writing up Writing a conclusion Writing up Writing an abstract and finalising the title The final shape General points about writing and presentation Communicating your findings The ‘territory’ of your writing Finding your voice Writers’ guidance for writers Non-sexist and non-discriminatory writing Presentation Other points Coda Further reading Checklist Appendix: Critical values for chi-square Glossary References Index About the Author Being of a nervous disposition as a child, Gary Thomas failed to write anything on his 11-plus examination paper, which inaction took him to secondary modern school. His subsequent zigzag through the education system gave him broad experience of its good and bad sides. He eventually became a teacher, then an educational psychologist, then a professor of education at the University of Birmingham, where his teaching, research and writing now focus on inclusive education and the methods used in social science research.
He has led a wide range of research projects and has received awards from the AHRC, the ESRC, the Nuffield Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Department for Education, charities such as Barnardo’s and the Cadmean Trust, local authorities and a range of other organisations. He has written or edited 20 books and lots of boring academic articles. He is editor of the journal Educational Review. He has two grown-up daughters, one little daughter, and – at current reckoning – two grandchildren.
He likes, in alphabetical order, cats, chess, cycling, dogs, gardening and writing. He dislikes 4×4 cars, pomposity and people who try to make things sound more complicated than they are (in that order). Despite supporting Aston Villa football club, he maintains an optimistic outlook on life. Follow Gary’s observations on social research on Twitter .… @garyhowto Preface In this third edition of How to Do Your Research Project, I have tried to respond to colleagues’, students’ and reviewers’ comments on things they would like more (or less) of in the book.
I’ve included new material on using the internet and social media, literature searching, methods of data gathering and analysis, and writing up. I’ve kept to my maxim that I will try to keep things straightforward, to use a conversational approach and, where there was a choice between a simple word and a hard one, to use the simple one. Research is useful and it is exciting to do, and the expectation for students to do a research project is becoming more and more common in almost every area of applied social science: education, health sciences, social work, criminology, and so on. And this is happening at every stage in higher education: foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate.
It is right that this should be the case – that students should be learning by doing research – for the research project teaches skills that no lecture can teach. Not only does it enable learning about the particular topic chosen for research; it also teaches students about having a questioning disposition, about evidence and the frailty of knowledge, and about methods of research and their strengths and weaknesses. It helps you to learn independently and to organise your time. With the skills and the awarenesses that it fosters, research provides an almost tangible platform for personal and professional development.
I don’t like to think too long about how many hundreds of projects – undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral – I have supervised, because it reminds me of my age. But the more I supervise the more I realise that whether you are doing an undergraduate project, a master’s, a PhD or a major piece of research for a government department, you always go through much the same sequence of activity. All research contains the same basic ingredients – having a question, discovering what others have done, refining your question in the light of that discovery and then going out to answer the question yourself. That’s the basic framework, and beyond that there are better and worse ways of going about doing it.
In this book I wanted to show the better ways, using examples (of mistakes as well as successes) from my own experience wherever possible, to those who are inexperienced in doing research: the ways that avoid pain and encourage satisfaction and pleasure. Yes, pleasure – research really can give you a buzz. There’s an immense satisfaction that comes from finding out something new and presenting it in a form that other people can understand. On the assumption that the basic ground rules for research are similar at whatever stage, I haven’t attempted to pitch this book at one particular group: undergraduate or postgraduate.
I’ve tried to keep it simple and straightforward in a way that I hope will appeal to all students in education and the social sciences, and whether you are an undergraduate or just beginning doctoral work I hope it will be relevant. While I realise that what emerges is inevitably a bit of a cookbook, I hope it is more of an Elizabeth David cookbook than any other – in other words, telling a story or set of stories, and containing opinions as well as recipes. At several points in the book I discuss the importance of critical reflection, and I hope that I have given a taster of this in my own writing. So, where there is methodological controversy I say so.
Where the academic community seems to me to be pretentious, pompous or unsure of itself, I also say so, and try to explain why. To my mind, there is no purpose in papering over the frailties of an academic area with verbosity, pretend-clarity or pseudo-scientific jargon; and where the academic community in applied social science seems to me to do this I say so. I hope that in communicating a critical disposition I have presented the book more as a series of conversations than as a set of lectures. I’ve wanted to write this book also because in my experience students undertaking projects often don’t think hard enough about the questions that they want to answer.
As a result, those projects are less interesting than they might have been, looking at a question that is much too hard to answer given the time available, or restricting the focus to something perceived to be easy to measure. Often certain approaches to research are completely sidestepped: numbers or anything to do with statistics may be studiously avoided, and this is partly because of the backgrounds of many students in education and the social sciences. They are cautious of using numbers, even though they have the ability and the wherewithal. It seemed to me that many of the introductory textbooks didn’t really help very much, focusing heavily on research methods rather than research processes, with too little information on how to knit together a story.
Methods are not the end of research – they are simply ways of doing it, and it’s more important that a piece of research has integrity, coherence and meaning than it is that a particular method is properly used.