Citation:

Takayoshi, Pamela, Tomlinson, Elizabeth, and Castillo, Jennifer. “The Construction of Research Problems and Methods.” Practicing Research in Writing Studies: Reflexive and Ethically Responsible Research. Hampton Press, 2012. 97-121.

Summary:

Takayoshi, Tomlinson and Castillo begin this essay by identifying, or perhaps constructing, an opening or gap in our understanding about writing research. They have noticed a relative lack of insight into the process researchers use to come up with research questions. They argue that this insight is important as without it researchers may let their preexisting assumptions and biases go unacknowledged, which can influence their research and reproduce biases surrounding race, class, gender etc. (97-98). They state that researchers create the research problems that act as the origin for their research questions as opposed to stumbling across existing problems.

They cover this formation process more specifically, citing accounts where researchers identify a “felt difficulty” (99), which involves the researcher more or less feeling out an inconsistency within a field, an inconsistency that necessarily draws on their personal experience for its existence. The authors elaborate more on this notion, that researchers create the problems and parameters of their research, with more testimonials and interview answers from scholars, and further show how research questions and methods come from personal assumptions, experiences, financial constraints, a surrounding community, familiarity with certain methods, and personal passions or interests. For many researchers this is an explicit feature of their research, that they choose something relevant to their lives, something that they’re interested in or have experienced already.

The authors briefly advocate for the purposeful discovery and explicit acknowledgement of our personal biases and assumptions, for the sake of maintaining accountability and integrity of research within their field. In order for research to be replicable and contribute to a larger body, it must be explicit about its influences. They describe their model as a more feminist research method, one that understands the researcher as a participant in the question & method construction. Finally, they offer a heuristic to use when researchers are creating research problems that will promote awareness of the influences that shape their decisions. It’s structured as a writing prompt, where the researcher answers a series of questions at the beginning of their research, but also returns to these questions and answers after the initial stages as well. The questions focus on motivations, existing beliefs, ideologies, professional needs, and assumptions. They work to make explicit the implicit stakes that researchers will necessarily have from the outset, according to the authors.

Analysis:

I have somewhat mixed feelings about this essay with regard to my own, eventual research design, and its overall applicability to that design. On one hand, I was sort of hoping for more specific techniques for constructing research methods, and moving from a problem to a question to data collection. The title of the essay attracted me, I thought that “The construction of research problems and methods” would refer to a “how-to” answer set. This was more of a meta-analysis/description of current existing trends and the way we perceive our data collection methods. I was feeling at a loss for how to investigate the topic I’m interested in, and this essay, insofar as it acted as a complication for method construction, did not really help orient my topic or interest towards a useful/tangible research design.

However, it would be a bit of a cop out to say that this essay was entirely a distraction or useless for me. For one, the idea of feeling out the research problem, or identifying some moment of cognitive dissonance within the relation of my beliefs/desires/habits and our curriculum is more or less what I’ve already been doing. While this essay worked as a caution against injecting our biases into our research, it still affirmed the subjectivity necessarily present in research construction. It permits the researcher to look inward, but it also exhorts the researcher to examine their subjectivity, to acknowledge the parameters they are applying, to see their individuality as another variable to identify in their methods. While I don’t have some super applicable set of action steps to take to build a research design, I do have a tangible starting point; my own interests.

The authors also offer through their heuristic, prompts for jumping forward from this starting point. Their questions, that function as a means to examine assumptions and biases, are phrased in such a way so that they will also prompt an expansive brainstorming about one’s research. For example, the question: “What do you already believe about the research problem?” (pg. 114) will help me identify my assumptions, but will also prompt additional questions. I believe that to really conduct experiential or place-based education we have to physically leave the classroom, but how true is this assumption? Is that assumption a sub-problem that I should investigate? Another example: “What professional or intellectual need does this fill?” (pg. 115) Is this research actually useful? Am I really looking to justify the adoption of a teaching method that I already know (in other words fulfilling a personal need, as opposed to a curricular or student need)? This forced justification of my research design will hopefully help configure the research so that it uses the curricular goals of 101 as a point of origin. I should turn inward for research inspiration, but I can’t allow myself to just research my own navel, or the research will quickly become irrelevant. I construct and interpret the research, but it has to serve a broader community.

I think that while the main audience for this essay would be folks with more research experience, and some fluency in these processes, I don’t feel totally outside the target audience. The same exhortations apply to my research process, and I can apply a similar heuristic to my constructed methods. I would still like a directly applicable framework for how to create a research design but maybe this is unrealistic, research is personalized to each problem it springs from, and the person that acts as the architect of that problem.

Quote Bank:

“If researchers are to be in control of their research practice, it is crucial to explore (and understand) the roles our epistemological, political, and ideological assumptions and commitments, as well as our experiences and knowledge, play in the shaping of our problems and questions.” (98)

“We argue in this chapter that researchers “create” problems and then develop research questions based on those perceived rather than preexisting, problems.” (98)

“Rather than seeing research questions ‘floating around in the world’ or existing in a ‘gap’ in the literature, we see the researcher as the interpretive point though which the research question is constructed as the researcher confronts inconsistencies in his or her ‘values, beliefs, opinions, organized and unorganized information.’” (101)

“When asked to reflect explicitly on the origins of their research questions, participants most prominently emphasized aspects of cognitive dissonance as the impetus for research problem formation…Although these responses all being with some type of cognitive dissonance, they really begin with the researcher herself” (104).

“In recognizing the individual as the interpretive lens through which data is filtered, we suggest the importance of articulating the role our subject positions have on what we notice, what we understand, and what we find interesting in our research practices.” (107)

“Sometimes the construction of one’s methods (as well as the research questions) are encouraged as well as constrained by the contexts in which one works.” (110)

“Ignoring how subjectivity shapes our research keeps us from being able to account for it as an influence.” (112)

“Counter to this striving for objectivity is a feminist research practice and methodology that insists on the recognition of the researcher as a participant in the construction of what questions get asked (and which do not), in the collection of data and work in the research sites, in the relationships enacted with participants.” (113)

“This heuristic provides researchers with prompts for thinking about their construction of research problems, research questions, and methods. Being explicit and detailed abuot their decision making and the intersection of their personal as well as professional commitments can make researchers consciously aware of important shaping influences on the research they conduct.” (114)

“In the final writing of our results, articulating these assumptions gives readers a fuller, more complex context for understanding our analysis.” (116)