Match of the Day and literature reviews

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Andrew Defty

Students embarking on their first substantive research project often struggle to understand where the literature review ends and the research begins, as do more experienced researchers. It is important to remember that a literature review should always be done before carrying out a piece of research (although it should be ongoing) and it shouldn’t involve a description of the phenomena that you are studying. Rather it is an account of what everyone else has said about that phenomena. I like Gina Wisker’s characterisation of it as a description of a conversation.

One way of thinking about this is compare your research to an edition of Match of the Day. Let’s presume that the subject of your research is a particular football match (it would need to be Match of the Day Live which shows a whole match rather than the highlights programme, because research should always be comprehensive). You are going to look at something particular within this match, say for example, a case study of the off-side rule. If the match itself is the subject of your research, the literature review comprises the comments made by the numerous pundits, Alan Hansen and his ilk, about the match. But instead of watching Match of the Day as you normally would, you should begin by skipping to the end and listening to everything the pundits have to say about the match. Obviously you would need to record it, or Sky+ it, or whatever you do these days. In doing this you will try to identify what the pundits found interesting about the match, what they agreed and disagreed about, and how they thought it related to other matches. Did Alan Hansen focus on the shocking defending (almost inevitably), while Alan Shearer stressed the importance of consistent crossing into the box. You might even wait until the next morning and read all of the accounts of the match in the morning press. Once again you will look for areas of common concern and of debate. This detailed knowledge of what everyone else has said about the match comprises your literature review.

Only when you have accumulated all of that and written it up should you actually move on to the research phase which is to actually watch the match yourself and arrive at your own conclusions. Your literature review will then inform the ideas you develop as you carry out your own research.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Andrew Defty

For those of you who are worried that this was all getting a bit scientific, one of the most interesting and enjoyable books I have read in recent years was Kristen Luker’s Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences. The book is really designed for graduate students but Luker does concede that it may be read by precocious undergraduates (and there are certainly some of those out there). This is an extremely rare thing in that it is a book about research methods which you can read from cover to cover without going mad, although you can of course dip in and out. To give you a flavour, I liked this from page 6:

You’ll be hearing a lot about “truth” in the social sciences… so you should probably know that both truth and its handmaiden objectivity are going through some tough times right now. Lots of social scientists see no problem at all with the concepts, and think they are as reliable and trustworthy as they ever were. Others dismiss even the attempt to approach something resembling the “truth” as hopelessly misbegotten, a relic of older and less sophisticated times. As for myself, I see the search for objectivity in the social sciences as something along the lines of Zen enlightenment: I don’t personally expect to achieve either of them, but I do find the pursuit worthwhile. Let me tell you two different parables to prove the point. It turns out that the ancient mariners (the Portuguese, not the one in the poem) accomplished extraordinary feats of navigation with bad, albeit beautiful, maps. They circumnavigated the globe with maps that had large sections around the edges inscribed “Here There Be Dragons.” So you and I can do the same. We can get a much better picture of the social world than the one we have at present, and we can get much farther than we ever imagined possible even if our maps do have the modern equivalent of dragons sketched all over them. The other parable is one told to me by my colleague Steve Epstein, to the effect that even the most radical, postmodernist, social constructionist Act-Up AIDS activist still wants to know if AZT works. In other words, sometimes we just need to know.

Kristin Luker (2008), Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-glut, Harvard University Press.

There is a good review in The Times Higher , and also here.  

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Developing great research questions

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Andrew Defty

Another interesting article from an American scientific journal, this time The American Journal of Health-System Pharmacists (!). This time about the development of great research questions.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Choosing a good scientific research problem

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Andrew Defty

This is a short article from the scientific journal, Molecular Cell, about choosing a good scientific problem. You might not be working in the field of cellular research but there is much the social sciences can learn from the natural sciences, and vice versa (see my previous post on Brian Cox and the importance of theory). There are a number of things which are particularly interesting in this article. I like the attempt to map possible research topics onto a graph with axes showing feasibility against whether the results have a significant impact. Difficult projects which result in a significant addition to the base of knowledge are clearly important but not necessarily where you should begin a research career (unless perhaps your name is Einstein). The best projects are those which are relatively easy to carry out yet have a significant impact, although such projects are not always easy to find, otherwise we would all be doing this kind of stuff all the time. As an undergraduate researcher you should be looking for what this author refers to as the ‘low-hanging fruit’, projects which are easy to complete with the resources available and which result in a modest increase in the body of knowledge. That doesn’t mean the results or the implications can’t be interesting, significant or new. I also like the emphasis on taking time to think about a problem, the author notes that in his lab students are made to spend 3 months mulling over a problem  before actually beginning their research. The timelines are compressed somewhat for the ambitious undergraduate researcher but begining to think about a final year research project from early in the second year is a good start.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Professor Brian Cox and the importance of good theory

Posted on February 1, 2014 by Andrew Defty

When embarking on a research project students are very often faced with the question of how their research relates to theory, or what the theoretical framework for their research is. Lisa Harrison, for example, points out ‘much of the research that we can carry out only begins to have any value when we can use it to support a particular theory’, while Burnham et al begin their study of research methods in politics by asserting that ‘it is the deployment of a theoretical framework that differentiates political science from other forms of the study of politics.’ However, while research methods text books (and tutors) are often quick to point out the importance of theory, explanations as to what this means in practice are often less clear.

The physicist Professor Brian Cox, hardly needs any more attention, he is as ubiquitous as dark matter and considerably easier to find. Nevertheless, I recently read Cox’s book, The Quantum Universe, written with his colleague Jeff Forshaw, and whilst I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that you rush out and read it, and I’m sure if you wait long enough he will be on the telly telling you all about it anyway, Cox and Forshaw do offer one useful description of what is meant by theory. They are talking about the use of theory in the natural sciences but it could equally apply to the social sciences:

A good scientific theory specifies a set of rules that determine what can and cannot happen to some portion of the world. They must allow predictions to be made that can be tested by observation. If the predictions are shown to be false, the theory is wrong and must be replaced. If the predictions are in accord with observation, the theory survives. No theory is ‘true’ in the sense that it must always be possible to falsify it. As the biologist Thomas Huxley wrote: ‘Science is organised common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.’ Any theory that is not amenable to falsification is not a scientific theory – in fact one might go so far as to say that it has no reliable information content at all. The reliance on falsification is why scientific theories are different from matters of opinion. The scientific meaning of the word ‘theory’, by the way, is different from its ordinary usage, where it often suggests a degree of speculation. Scientific theories may be speculative if they have not yet been confronted with the evidence, but an established theory is something that is supported by a large body of evidence. Scientists strive to develop theories that encompass as wide a range of phenomena as possible, and physicists in particular tend to get very excited about the prospect of describing everything that can happen in the material world in terms of a small number of rules. Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (2011), The Quantum Universe: Everything that can happen does happen, London: Penguin, p.14.

Which is a somewhat more considered attempt at arriving at an all-encompassing explanation than one of Cox’s earlier forays into this area, which went something along the lines of ‘Things can only get better’ .

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment