WHAT ARE THE PROCESSES IN RESEARCH WORK?

The Research Process

How do you go about answering an interesting question? The research process is broadly summarized in chart below. You begin with an observation that you want to understand, and this observation could be a situation you noticed or could be based on some data. From your initial observation you consult relevant theories and generate explanations (hypotheses) for those observations, from which you can make predictions. To test your prediction you need data. First you collect some relevant data (and to do that you need to identify things that can be measured) and then you analyse those data. The analysis of the data may support your hypothesis, or generate a new one, which, in turn, might lead you to revise the theory. As such, the processes of data collection and analysis and generating theories are intrinsically linked: theories lead to data collection/analysis and data collection/analysis informs theories. This research process will be explained in more detail in the coming posts. In his younger days my cat actually did climb up and stare at the TV when birds were being shown.

                The Research Process

Now let me take you through the process one by one.

Initial Observation:

Finding something that needs explaining. The first step in the above chart was to come up with a question that needs an answer. A friend spend rather more time than I should watching reality TV. Over many years, he used to swear that he wouldn’t get hooked on reality TV, and yet year upon year he would find himself glued to the TV screen waiting for the next contestant’s meltdown. He used to wonder why there is so much arguing in these shows, and why so many contestants have really unpleasant personalities.

A lot of scientific endeavour starts this way: not by watching reality TV, but by observing something in the world and wondering why it happens. This disorder is characterized by (among other things) a grandiose sense of self-importance, arrogance, lack of empathy for others, envy of others and belief that others envy them, excessive fantasies of brilliance or beauty, the need for excessive admiration, and exploitation of others. Having made a casual observation about the world (reality TV contestants on the whole have extreme personalities and argue a lot) by my friend and share it with which make me curious too, as a researcher I need to collect some data to see whether this observation is true (and not a biased observation). To do this, I need to define one or more variables to measure and quantify the thing I’m trying to measure. There’s one variable in this example: the personality of the contestant. I could measure this variable by giving them one of the many well established questionnaires that measure personality characteristics. Let’s say that I did this and I found that 75% of contestants did have narcissistic personality disorder. These data support my observation: a lot of reality TV contestants have extreme personalities.

In the next post I will talk about the next step in the research process – Theory and hypothesis testing.