Starting research: Loosing your way to finding it

I am writing this post to bring to the attention of all students who are keen on doing research on any topic in the domain of media and communication. The search usually begins with associating some personal observation or maybe simply browsing through a couple of books or research papers on your topic of interest. Mind you topic of research is is not the research problem or research question itself.

Sometimes you may want to simply test a theory, test its applicability and so a need to do research. Many a times I have been asked what is this need to study theory. I would say majorly for two reasons. One you need to understand the phenomenon so study a theory or second to study a phenomenon to theorize it. That is where research comes in, and the need to study theory and research together as subjects to understand how the world we live in operates, how we work? etc.

The most crucial part is getting down to your research problem or research question, which requires tremendous amount of reading. Research papers from journals, books, speaking to people to know that you haven't taken any ride which will lead to you to nowhere. Research question is most basic to a research topic. It is the guide or the map that will define your path of doing research.

As Zina O'leary clealry gives steps on forming a research question which sums it all:-

• What is your topic?
• What is the context for your research? community, school etc
• What do you want to achieve? i.e to discover, to describe, to change, to explore, to explain, to develop, to understand...
• What is the nature of your research question? i.e. a what? who, where, how, when or why question
• Are there any potential relationships you want to explore? i.e impacts, increases, decreases, relationships, correlations, causes etc. (Researching Real-World Problems: A Guide to Methods of Inquiry)

You may not find direct reading material on your chosen topic but sometimes you may have to link different researches and theories to your current topic. So it may be overwhelming or a feel of getting lost in so much information, but you have to loose your way to find it.

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.

Post Postivism and Research approach in Public Relations

This topic got me thinking when somebody said that research does not always work.There is a theoretical approach to the whole thinking process of choosing the right way to do research.

Generally research is confused with being statistical and every answer asked in a research question can only exist if proven scientifically based on a certain perspective."Positivism is an epistemological perspective and philosophy of science which holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on sense experience and positive verification." source: Wikipedia

Post-Positivism begs to differ."In philosophy and models of scientific inquiry, post-positivism (also called postempiricism) is a metatheoretical stance following positivism. Post-positivists believe that human knowledge is based not on unchallengeable, rock-solid foundations, but rather upon human conjectures."source: Wikipedia

 When we look up both the definitions we understand that  Post positivism approach if applied to research in areas like Marketing, Public Relations and Advertising will probably give more space to understand people and their issues than simply looking at them as statistical samples.

Solutions in such cases in research can be obtained far better than other otherwise, other than simply discarding research as a subject that does not deliver.

Also read more on this on http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/ and material written on the same by Zina O'leary.