As most of you who follow me on Twitter or read my blog probably know, I have been teaching research methods courses for a while now (mostly at the Masters and PhD levels). Thus I have been reflecting on issues related to training and teaching research methods. This morning, something really hit me as I was preparing an asynchronous lecture:
We lack serious training in research methods choice and selection.
We keep saying “choose the method according to the research question”. But this requires that the student KNOW multiple methods, for data collection AND data analysis. Moreover, developing criteria for method choice and selection requires students to learn heuristics that can help them build decision trees and models of the type
“IF research question 1
THEN (data collection method 1 AND data analysis 1)
ELSE search RM”
This is why research methods training is very hard, and why it’s imperative that whoever teaches methods goes over the details of multiple methodological and empirical strategies, using case studies: so students can see for themselves how researchers make methodological choices. I choose ethnography as a core methodological strategy because it helps me understand the lives of individuals facing water insecurity, toilet insecurity, and those who work in the informal waste sectors. I know how to use many other methods, but I make an actual choice/decision.
One of the reasons why I assign multiple empirical analyses in my courses is that I want my students to learn HOW different researchers and research teams have made decisions on which methods for data collection, analysis and presentation they used. Which heuristics did they use? I was thinking of teaching an advanced course on ethnography, and realized that one of the ways in which I have learned how to improve my own ethnographic work is by reading book-length ethnographies. I have read many! I’ve learned about the decisions ethnographers made.
We need to change how we teach research methods. We really do. We need to seriously engage with the challenge of teaching method choice and selection. I believe one of the key gaps in methods training is method choice heuristics. How do I know how to choose a method to answer a specific question? How do I make a choice that gives me the answers I need? These are key questions that faculty teaching research methods need to teach students so they can, in turn, answer them.
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