ENGLISH RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 2
TRUONG VAN ANH
SAIGON UNIVERSITY
Chapter 2: Getting Started
Introduction
• Choosing a topic. The issues to bear in mind in deciding what you are going to research.
• What to do if you can’t think of a topic. Some hints and tips on how to develop one.
• Focusing. How to get from your initial idea to something that is feasible and relevant.
• Finding and choosing your supervisor. How to go about selecting your most important research contact.
• Individual and group research. The different factors to bear in mind if you are going to be researching with others.
• Researching in your workplace/at university. The advantages and disadvantages, and how to cope.
• Keeping your research diary. Make up your mind now to record your feelings, experience, decisions and ideas as you undertake your research project.
Choosing a topic
You should focus on your research for your CV and future profession. Choosing your research topic is probably the single most important decision you have to make in doing research. We will discuss twelve points
you might bear in mind in making that choice.
1/ How much choice you have
It is important to be aware of the different expectations of employers and educational institutions, and to plan ahead accordingly.
2/ Your motivation
You should wonder if the research will make you better.
3/ Regulations and expectations
You should follow the relevant rules and regulations of your university/workplace.


4/ Your subject or field of study
It may have preferred styles or conventions for writing, and preferred methodologies for undertaking research. You should:
• talk to your supervisor, the colleagues or other researchers in the area;
• look at other examples of recent research projects carried out in your subject area;
• look at the research literature for your subject area (books, journals and reports).
5/ Previous examples of research projects
There must be previous similar research for you to go over. Or you may get some experience from your supervisor.


6/ The size of your topic
The topic is to be the right size: not too big, not too small, but doable within the time, space and
resources available. There will almost certainly still be restrictions on the size and format of your report.
7/ The time you have available
You should consider the time you have available for your research. About 10 months: from June this year to April next year.
8/ The cost of research
• Fees for degree registration or examination.
• Travel costs to and from your university or college, and/or your research sites.
• The costs of consumables such as paper, tapes, ink cartridges and batteries.
• Charges for access to certain institutions or individuals, or the internet.
• Equipment purchase or hire costs (e.g. computer, tape recorder, software).
• Book, report and journal purchases.
• Photocopying, printing and publication costs.
• Postage and telephone costs.
• Library fines!
9/ The resources you have available
Your resources may include, for example, a personal computer, access to some administrative support, and, perhaps most importantly, a good library and access to the internet.
Notes: You may get the resources you are in need of from Mr. Truong Van Anh.
10/ Your need for support
You may need personal and emotional support, rather
than the academic kind. In other words, who will ask you ‘how’s it going’, who will make you cups of tea, who will give you permission not to do things, and
who will you be able to ‘earbash’ about your research? They may be your relatives and friends (boy- or girl-).
11/ Access issues
Access can be seen as relating as much to the resources you have available (e.g. a good library). It may make sense to choose a topic for which you believe access will be less problematic.



12/ Methods for researching
In choosing a research topic, it makes sense to think about the methods you will use to collect and analyze data as soon as possible. If you like talking to people, you might be well advised to make use
of interview methods. If, on the other hand, you don’t like talking to people, you might think about undertaking library, internet or document-based research. And if you like carrying out statistical or multivariate analyses, you might consider a more quantitative methodology.
What to do if you can’t think of a topic
It may be, of course, that you are committed to doing a piece of research, but you just can’t think of what to do. This is quite a common problem, and may be associated with your confidence, or lack of it, in undertaking a research project. This section is designed to help you address this problem.
Ask your supervisor, manager, friends, colleagues, customers, clients or mother
Look at previous research work
There are almost certainly many examples of similar kinds of research projects which you could look at, whether these are presented in the form of published
articles or as research reports or theses.
Develop some of your previous research, or your practice at work
You should wonder if you could develop the research you have followed. Or, alternatively, you might choose to research a topic which was engaging your attention, and demanding your time at work university. Your own
curiosity and desire to learn are excellent places to start.
Relate it to your other interests
You will probably have a range of interests outside of your work or course of study. These might include, for example, family, social, voluntary, community or sporting activities.
Think of a title
You may find that thinking of possible titles for research suggests topics of interest to you. After all, a lot of the initial attraction in a book, television
program or film resides in the title. They may be punning, alliterative and/or pithy. They might pose a key research question in a succinct fashion, or
suggest a new area for research.
For example:
The correlation among the subjects
On trying analyzing the propositions in KIEU
The genders represented in the English language
English paraphrases

Start from a quote that engages you
Another approach is to extract from the literature you have read one or more quotations which really engage your attention. We are talking here about the
kind of statement which draws a strong positive or negative reaction; which makes you think that the author really knows their stuff, or, alternatively,
doesn’t know what they are talking about. These quotations may be comments, interpretations of research data, questions or assertions. They may even directly identify areas needing further research.


Follow your hunches
You may have a strong instinctive feeling that a particular area or issue needs researching, or will raise interesting questions. This may be because of a critical
incident you have experienced. Or it may be that something about it surprises or puzzles you, or just doesn’t seem quite right. Don’t be afraid to follow such
hunches and see where they lead. But, as with all the suggestions given here, don’t expend too much time and energy on them if it appears they are not
getting you anywhere.
Draw yourself a picture or diagram
Producing a spider diagram of issues, interests, questions and their possible interconnections is a standard technique. It can be undertaken individually or in a group. It may help you to identify or isolate particular areas for research, and suggest how these are related to your general subject area. You might then wish to share your diagram with others, to get their responses and suggestions. An example of such a diagram is given in Box 2.2.


Just start anywhere
Finally, if none of the above engages or appeals to you, you could just start anywhere. Go away and read something, or talk to somebody, about some of the issues relevant to your general subject area. Sketch out and begin a research project, any research project of about the right size, even if it feels dull and routine at first. Something better is likely to come out of this activity, perhaps something completely different.


Be prepared to change direction
Changing direction may become necessary if you are denied access to important people or documents, if insufficient people respond to your questions, if you cannot find the data you thought was there, if you change job or move house, if you get bored, or for other reasons. Having some in-built flexibility in
your research plans, a Plan B – thoughts about alternative approaches to the same question, or about different directions away from your starting point – is a very good idea.
Remember:
• Change can be positive.
• It’s OK to change.
• Lots of people change their research project or focus.
• You always end up at a different place from where you thought you were going anyway.

Focusing
Once you have chosen a topic, or perhaps a number of possible alternative topics, you will almost certainly need to refine it and focus it. Focusing is not an instantaneous process, but takes place over time. During this period you will likely be doing a lot of background reading, thinking about the methods
you will use in your research, and refining your research design. Indeed, many research projects are not finally focused until the data collection and analysis
process is well advanced.
Five important focusing questions
Working from a qualitative research perspective, Mason (2002: 13–22) suggests there are five sets of difficult questions that you need to work through in
order to find out what is the essence of your inquiry. These are:
1 What is the nature of the phenomena, or entities, or social ‘reality’ that you wish to investigate? For example, are you interested in social actors or behaviors, in feelings, in memories, in policy, in organizational practices?
2 What might represent knowledge or evidence of the entities or social ‘reality’ that you wish to investigate? For example, what would count as evidence of organizational practices?
3 What topic or broad substantive area is the research concerned with? What would be the generic label for your research?
4 What is the intellectual puzzle? What do you wish to explain or explore? What type of puzzle is it? Mason suggests three common intellectual puzzles: (a) developmental puzzles, i.e. how and why did X come about; (b) mechanical puzzles, i.e. how does X work;
(c) causal puzzles, i.e. what influence does X have on Y.
5 What is the purpose of your research? What are you doing it for? Mason indicates that this question requires us to consider the political and ethical issues of our research.
Identifying your research questions or hypotheses
An obvious starting point for focusing is to try to set out, loosely at first and then more precisely, the questions you want to answer in your research project. If it suits you, you might express these as hypotheses which you will then seek either to prove or to disprove.
In a small-scale research project you are unlikely to be able to handle more than two or three main research questions.
Research questions are like objectives rather than aims: they should contain within themselves the means for assessing their achievement.
Refining research questions
In one case, a student stated that they wanted to do ‘something on vocational qualifications’. In the second, the researcher was interested in the ‘politics of development’.
Concepts, issues and contexts
Concepts. Dey (1993: 275) defines the term ‘concept’ as ‘a general idea which stands for a class of objects’.
Issues. These refer to the broad questions that underlie and direct disciplines, sub-disciplines or subject areas, as well as public affairs.
Context. This relates to the background of existing research, knowledge and understanding that informs new and ongoing research projects.
Defining the key concepts, issues and contexts of your research project should also assist you in focusing your work, as well as being of great help to you later on in your project.
Using the doughnut and jam roly-poly models of research













The doughnut provides a static image, a beginning or end point, and does not convey much about the process of research. As such, while it offers a good starting point for using metaphors in this context, it needs further development. Hence the jam roly-poly or Swiss roll is better.
This alternative image expresses the continual interleaving of context and specifics, as well as the multiple possibilities for interconnections between them. Thus, the jam roly-poly can be sliced at any point to give a stratified mixture of jam and pastry, or, by analogy, research data and theory or context. These relationships hold throughout the length of the jam roly-poly, suggesting a thematic approach to research, running from beginning to end. And the image allows for different conceptualizations: there could be different proportions of jam and roly-poly, different flavours of jam and different colourings used.

Sketching a research outline or project proposal
Another technique which should help you to focus your research ideas is to try to sketch out a proposal or outline of your research project and plans.
You may already have drafted your research questions, and have a good idea of the key concepts, issues and contexts involved, but do you have a clear notion of what the whole project might look like? Can you sketch out a summary of how your eventual research report, dissertation or thesis might be organized? This is the theme of Exercise 2.5.
Questions a research proposal should answer
At the most general level:
1 What:
• What is my research about?
• What is its purpose?
• What is it trying to find out or achieve?
especially:
• What questions is it trying to answer?
2 How:
• How will my research answer its questions?
3 Why:
• Why is this research worth doing?
More specifically:
4 What is my research area? Have I clearly identified it?
5 What is my topic? Have I clearly identified it and shown how it fits within the research area?
6 What are my general research questions?
7 What are my specific research questions?
8 Does each specific research question meet the empirical criterion? Is it clear what data are required to answer each question?
(Source: Punch 2000: 32)

Trying it out on a non-specialist: explaining your topic in simple language
It is important that you are able to explain your research project in simple, everyday terms. You need to be able to render the strange familiar, as well as, at other times, the familiar strange.
There will not be many people who will understand, or want to understand, the details of your theoretical framework, methodology, sampling strategy or analytical approach. This may be the case even if you are carrying out your research within a university department or research institute, if only because
research outside the sciences tends to be both a specialized and individualized activity.
Informal piloting
It is to actually start your research project with some ‘informal’ pilot activity. An informal pilot could turn into a pilot, but is meant as an early initial try-out through which you can judge the feasibility of your overall research plans and then make modifications as necessary.
If you like the idea of informal piloting, try to carry out a couple of interviews, or get some friends to fill in a few questionnaires, or go and observe some organizational activities. If you do it early, it should enable you to alter your strategy, if necessary, to something more effective and feasible.
Finding and choosing your supervisor
If you are a novice or small-scale researcher, the sort of person whom this book is aimed at, you will most likely have or need a supervisor, though you may not use that term.
Your relationship with your supervisor is of critical importance for you and your research. This is not to say that you can’t get through the job without having a good supervisor and a wonderful supervisory relationship, but you will probably find it a lot easier, more stimulating and more rewarding if you do.


What is a supervisor?
‘Supervisor’ has personal responsibility for overseeing the progress of individual students’ research projects. Ideally, supervisors should have some knowledge of the specialist areas in which their students are researching, plus a general understanding of the research process and the various strategies possible. They should have an inside knowledge of the rules and regulations, both written and unwritten, affecting your research project. They should have some skill in conducting the kind of in-depth, but partial and discontinuous, relationships required for successful supervision. And they should help to keep you focused on your research.


Before you get this far, however, it might be as well to ask yourself just what you want, and by implication what you don’t want, from your supervisor. Try Exercise 2.6.
In Box 2.9 you will find two lists:
• Nine qualities which research students expect from their supervisors
• Six qualities which supervisors expect from their students.
What students expect of their supervisors
• To be supervised
• To read their work well in advance
• To be available when needed
• To be friendly, open and supportive
• To be constructively critical
• To have a good knowledge of their research area
• To structure the tutorial so that it is relatively easy to exchange ideas
• To have sufficient interest in their research to put more information in the student’s path
• To be sufficiently involved in their success to help them get a good job at the end of it all!
What supervisors expect of their students
• To be independent
• To produce written work that is not just a first draft
• To have regular meetings
• To be honest when reporting upon their progress
• To follow the advice that they give, when it has been given at their request
• To be excited about their work, able to surprise them and fun to be with!
(Source: Phillips and Pugh 2005: chs 8 and 11)

Individual and group research
You may do your research by yourself or by a group of you.
Individual versus group research
What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing group research?
Individual research
• Gives you sole ownership of the research
• Means that you are wholly responsible for its progress and success
• May result in a more focused project
• Is of an overall quality determined by you alone
• Means that you have to carry out all elements of the research process.


Group research
• Enables you to share responsibility
• Lets you specialize in those aspects of the work to which you are best suited
• Provides you with useful experience of team working
• Allows you to take on larger-scale topics than you could otherwise manage
• Provides you with a ready-made support network
• May be essential for certain kinds of research.

Managing the group
If you are involved in a small-scale group research activity, much depends, of course, on the size and composition of the group undertaking the research, and on the existing power relationships among these people. Unless you are all of much the same age, from the same kind of background, on the same wavelengths, and with similar motivations, you will need to work out ways of resolving differences, planning ahead and implementing the research project. This will almost certainly involve some division of responsibilities, regular discussion of progress and probably also some leadership.



Key issues for group researchers
1 Does the group need and have a leader?
2 Who is responsible for:
• organizing meetings?
• keeping records?
• chasing progress?
3 What are the strengths and weaknesses of the group for carrying out the research project?
4 How are the different roles and tasks required for the successful completion of the research project shared among the group?
5 Will everyone in the group have a role in each phase of the research, or will some specialize in particular phases?



6 Does every member of the group have a clear idea of their tasks and responsibilities?
7 Do you each feel able to respect differences between group members?
8 Are there individuals or subgroups within the group who are not happy with the task or organization of the group?
9 How will the group deal with emotions?
10 Will the results of the research be reported on and written up individually, collectively, or both?

Producing the finished product
When undertaking any piece of research, it is always a good idea to have an idea of what the finished product might look like. This is particularly true for group research. The issue arises whether the final report or dissertation (and its assessment) is going to be a truly joint effort, or whether separate reports are going to be produced by the different individuals involved in the group.
You may formally need not only to produce a separate individual product, but also to demonstrate clearly what your own contribution has been and how you have carved out something of your own from the overall group research. If this is the case, you should plan your work within the group accordingly so
that you are not disadvantaged.
Researching in your workplace
Keeping your research diary
First, journals gave students an opportunity to write regularly and at length, allowing them to develop their ideas and writing fluency . . . Second, writing journals enabled students to construct a ‘map’ of the complex structures and relationships in a course or range of material . . . Third, writing journals encouraged the students to think differently.
The pros and cons of researching your own workplace
Advantages
• Ease of access
• You may be able to do some research in work time
• You may receive financial and other support from your employer
• Insider knowledge
• You can get down a lot deeper quicker

• Your colleagues may provide you with lots of useful contacts
• You may know the answers already
• It may help your promotion.
Disadvantages
• Pressure from your employer to research what they want, how they want and to reach the conclusions they want
• Problems with researching those you also manage, or are managed by
• Difficulties in maintaining anonymity
• Knowing where the bodies are buried
• It can feel like you’re always at work
• You may be expected to do your research and your job
• Your conclusions may be rejected or ignored
• What happens if you change your job?
• You may think that you know the answers already
• You may overlook the significance of things that seem obvious
• You could learn a lot more by researching the unfamiliar.
Exercises
2.1 Make as complete a list as you can of all the costs you are likely to incur during your research project. Add an additional figure for unexpected costs. Can you afford it?
2.2 Make a list of all the (financial and non-financial) resources you have access to, and of those you believe you will need access to in order to carry out your research project. How will you access those resources you don’t already have access to?
2.3 Write down up to four key questions which your research project seeks to address. Begin each one with a questioning word such as how, who, what, when or why. Which of these questions is the most important or central to your research?
2.4 Make a list of the key concepts, issues and contexts of importance to your research (see Box 2.5 for explanations of these terms).
2.5 Note down the prospective contents of your planned dissertation, thesis or report. You can do this chapter by chapter, or section by section, but include subheadings and details. Try to set yourself realistic word limits for the various chapters or sections.
2.6 Identify and list the qualities you are looking for in your supervisor(s). Once you have done this, arrange them in order of priority.







Good luck!