Saturday, April 27, 2013

Nipping it in the bud : Overcoming the fear of doing Research

Dissertations or thesis writing sessions are usually no fun for students except a few very academic oriented ones. Research is always this humongous task which looks very daunting and very intimidating to budding researchers. 

Well I don't blame them. We all went through this phase. I was preparing some fresh lectures for my research classes to begin in the next academic year. Keeping in mind all the experiences I have had so far while teaching the subject and then coaxing them to submit a research proposal and later a complete thesis I could come up with some points.

Research actually becomes easy if we begin with reading or simply observing. Keeping ears and eyes open can be the first step to doing research. Thus research is born out of identifying an issue which needs further study so it could be studying professions, studying a particular case at hand or simply studying events which have already taken place. 

 One cannot do something if one does not like doing it. So one has to first carefully choose out of many the topic of research that one would like to do.

Once this is clear, a thorough search of the problem at hand is to be looked upon. A simple google search or a quick run to the local library of the institution would help you to know what other researchers have already said about your topic that you have chosen. At the same time you could come up with a working research question and a working hypothesis which could become like road maps giving you a direction to where you are headed for. They will also remind you in case you slip away from your goal: Your chosen topic. 

Your search will essentially lead you to what appears the toughest while penning down a research: "The literature review" Will not go much into this as this is not the intention of this article and it is assumed here that you know what that means.

So you see a little effort from your side will result in a cluster of research papers or books or credible articles which helped you formulate and even tighten your research question and hypothesis.

Now you wonder why you did all this? Well the answer is that your next step of your research usually and ideally follows from all the ground work you just did. Now this will help in deciding the best methodology and methods which will help in implementing your research. It will help you in deciding your samples from the population at large. It will help you in deciding what should be the tools of your research and how you would prepare them, here I mean your questionnaire. Assuming you are doing a survey or an in-depth interview. But there could be other tools too. There your Guide could help you in deciding that.

The most important part in doing your research is getting all the above in place, as that would have prepared the foundation of your research. Now the next step would be the actual data collection. This is another phase which needs to given enough time as we should understand that if I am doing a survey or an in-depth interview the respondents are not in my hands. They are somewhere there and I am at their mercy of being given time for the data collection. If this method was content analysis of either text, audio or video or all, the time taken in doing a large amount of content collection has to be well thought of as this also takes up your time. (Here the example is of some basic methods, there are others too.)

Once this is done, next step is penning down your findings and analyzing them. You may require the help of your Guide here again and of course all the literature that you had reviewed will be useful while analysing. 

The final step is the conclusion. Here the researcher pens down his/her views, the place where the researcher is able to voice but now with all the credibility of the above data in place. A holistic picture of all that you have done so far has to be critically examined and a conclusion drawn. The limitation & delimitation of the study and of course the future scope of this research has to be written so as to remind the reader of the boundaries of your research.

Research is a journey and it never completely ends at one point. It is continuous and can be re-looked upon time and again by different people, always helping us understand the why and hows of this world.

This was a small attempt in driving out the fear of doing research, hopefully it helps you to break free.




2 comments:

  1. Yes, Dr. Meenakshi, its a good guide for me as I m currently preparing my dissertation on " Clients' Pressure on PR Professionals for maximum media coverage"..
    If u r a PR professional workin in Mumbai, then do help me out clicking the link below n spending ur few precious mins to fill in the questionnaire.. Or else, please to forward to people whom u know..

    https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ooBcthrqKcB5xKo_SFHFYPOC6TcCRriGWx6IL1wcZeg/viewform?sid=d3ae2e3678124bb&token=7Bm1QD4BAAA.p7DN9sh7qmXO8Dkuha28Yg.SvXqXKmR-S990OJmognvhA

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Sirsha. I am not a practitioner but an educator. You could send this link on the Indian PR forum and similar such communities where chances of response may be there.

    ReplyDelete