2. Assessment One

University of Botswana

Department of Media Studies

BMS 328 COMMUNICATION RESEARCH METHODS

HANDOUT 2: ASSESSMENT 1

Read the following chapter and answer the questions at the end.

 

Chapter 1 of Practical Research (1997), Paul D. Leedy, Timothy J. Newby, Peggy A. Ertmer, Prentice-Hall EDITED VERSION
 http://www.geocities.com/Athens/3238/page3-15.htm

What is Research?

Everywhere, our knowledge is incomplete and problems are waiting to be solved. We address the void in our knowledge and those unresolved problems by asking relevant questions and seeking answers to them. The role of research is to provide a method for obtaining those answers by inquiringly studying the evidence within the parameters of the scientific method.
The word research is used in everyday speech to cover a broad spectrum of meaning, which makes it a decidedly confusing term for students who must learn to use the word in its specialized denotation. Much that students have learned they must suddenly unlearn; many of the false concepts they had previously learned they must discard.

Unfortunately, many students have been taught misconceptions about the nature of research. They have heard the word research used loosely and given multiple, misleading meanings. On one hand, the word connotes the finding of an item of information or the making of notes and the writing of a documented paper. On the other hand, it is used for the act of informing oneself about what one does not know or of rummaging through available sources to retrieve a bit of information. Merchandisers use the word to suggest the discovery of a revolutionary product when, often, the truth is that only a minor alteration has been made to an existing product, with the purpose of enhancing the product's sales appeal. All these activities have been called research but should have been called by their appropriate names: information gathering, library skills, documentation, self-enlightenment, and an attention-getting sales pitch.

The word research has a certain mystique about it. It suggests to many people an activity that is exclusive and removed from everyday life. Researchers are sometimes regarded as esoteric individuals who seclude themselves in laboratories, in scholarly libraries, or within the precincts of an academic environment. The public generally is not aware of their daily activity or of the important contributions their work frequently makes to people's comfort and general welfare. Many people, therefore, regard research as a way of life dissociated from the common activities of the everyday world.

The purpose of this chapter is to dispel these myths and misconceptions and to present an accurate definition of research. I define research here as the systematic process of collecting and analyzing information (data) in order to increase our understanding of the phenomenon with which we are concerned or interested. Although this conception of research may seem somewhat remote and academic, many people rely on a truncated form of it each day to solve smaller problems than those resolved by the more elaborate methodology of formal research. It is with formal research, however, that we are concerned in this text.

To appreciate the difference between people's common understanding of research and the more accurate definition, we can perhaps better understand the latter by first looking at the nature of the former.

WHAT RESEARCH IS NOT

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I have suggested that the word research has been so loosely employed in everyday speech that few people have any idea of its real meaning. Here are a few guidelines as to what research is not; accompanying each guideline is an illustration depicting the popular concept often held about research.

1. Research is not mere information gathering. A fourth-grade child came home from school with this announcement: "Mom, the teacher sent us to the library today to do research, and I learned a lot about Columbus." This child has been given the idea that research means going to the library to get information or to glean a few facts. This may be information discovery; it may be learning reference skills; but it certainly is not, as the teacher so termed it, research.

2. Research is not mere transportation of facts from one location to another. A student completes a "research paper" on the Dark Lady in the sonnets of William Shakespeare. Although the student did, indeed, go through certain activities associated with formal research -- collecting data, assembling a bibliography, referencing statements properly -- these activities still do not add up to a true "research" paper. The student missed the essence of research: the interpretation of data. Nowhere in the paper did the student say, in effect. "These facts that I have gathered seem to indicate this about the Dark Lady." Nowhere did the student draw conclusions or interpret the facts themselves. This student is next door to genuine research; but the mere compilation of facts, presented with reference citations and arranged in a series, no matter how appealingly neat the format, misses genuine research by a hair. A little farther, and this student would have traveled from one world to another: from the world of mere transportation of fact to the world of interpretation of fact. The difference between the two worlds is the distinction between transference of information and genuine research -- a distinction that is important to understand.

Unfortunately, many students think that looking up a few facts and transferring them to a written paper with benefit of references constitutes research. Such activity is, of course, more realistically called fact discovery, fact transportation, and / or fact transcription.
 
3. Research is not merely rummaging for information. The house across the street is for sale. I consider buying it, and so I call my realtor to find out how much my own home would sell for. "I'll have to do some research," the realtor says, "to find the fair market value of your property." What the realtor calls "doing some research" means, of course, going through files of recent sales of properties comparable to mine to see what they have sold for; this will give the realtor an estimate to report to me. This so-called research is little more than rummaging through files to find what the realtor did not know. Rummaging, whether in one's personal records or in the public or college library. is not research. It is accurately termed an exercise in self-enlightenment.

4. Research is not a catchword used to get attention. The morning mail arrives. I open an envelope and pull out its contents. A statement in boldface type commands attention:

Years of Research Have Produced a New Car Wash!

Give Your Car a Miracle Shine with Soapy Suds! 

The phrase "years of research" catches my attention. The product must be good, I reason, because "years of research" have been spent on developing it. I order the product -- and what do I get? Dish-washing detergent! No research. merely the clever use of a catch-word that, indeed, fulfilled its purpose: to catch my attention. "Years of research" -- what an attention-getting phrase, yet how misleading!

Formal research is entirely different from any of the above activities. I outline its essential nature and characteristics in the following section.

WHAT RESEARCH IS

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Research is a process through which we attempt to achieve systematically and with the support of data the answer to a question, the resolution of a problem, or a greater understanding of a phenomenon. This process, which is frequently called research methodology, has these distinct characteristics:

1. Research originates with a question or problem.
2. Research requires a clear articulation of a goal.
3. Research follows a specific plan of procedure.
4. Research usually divides the principal problem into more manageable subproblems.
5. Research is guided by the specific research problem, question, or hypothesis.
6. Research accepts certain critical assumptions.
7. Research requires the collection and interpretation of data in attempting to resolve the problem that initiated the research.

I discuss each of these characteristics in turn so that you appreciate more fully the precise nature of formal research.

Characteristics of Formal Research

1. Research originates with a question or problem. The world is filled with unanswered questions, unresolved problems. Everywhere we look, we observe things that cause us to wonder, to speculate, to ask questions. And by asking questions, we strike the first spark igniting a chain reaction that terminates in the research process. An inquisitive mind is the beginning of research. There is so much that we do not know that we do not understand! The hope of mitigating our ignorance lies in the questions we ask and the information we gather and in whose collective meaning we may find insight.
Look around you. Consider the unresolved situations that evoke these questions: Why? What's the cause of that? What does it all mean? These are everyday questions. With questions like these, research begins.

2. Research requires a clear articulation of a goal. A clear, unambiguous statement of the problem is critical. This statement is an exercise in intellectual honesty. The statement asks the researcher, "What precisely do you intend to do?" This is basic and is required for the success of any research undertaking. Without it, the research is on shaky ground indeed.

3. Research requires a specific plan of procedure. Research is not an excursion into happy expectation, of fondly hoping that the data necessary to solve the problem will somehow fortuitously turn up. It is, instead, a carefully planned attack, a search-and-discover mission explicitly planned in advance. Consider the title of this text: Practical Research: Planning and Design. The last three words are the important ones. The overall research effort must be explicitly planned and logically designed. Researchers plan their overall research design and specific research methods in a purposeful way -- that is, to yield data relevant to their particular research problem. Depending on the specific research question, different designs and methods will be more or less appropriate.

In the section immediately preceding this one, you considered the goal for research; that was what you intended to do. Here, you state the plan, the design; this is how you propose to reach that goal. You must not wait until you're chin deep in the project to plan and design your strategy; In the formative stages of the research project, much can be decided: Where are the data? Do any existent data address themselves to the research problem? Even if the data exist, is it reasonable that you have access to them? Presuming that you have access to the data, what will you do with them after they are in your possession? I might go on and on. These questions merely hint that planning and design cannot be postponed. Each of the questions above must have an answer early in the research process.

4. Research usually divides the principal problem into more manageable subproblems. The whole is composed of the sum of its parts. That is a universal natural law; that is also a good precept to observe in thinking about one's principal goal in research. We break down principal problems much more frequently than we realize.

Let's take an everyday problem to see how it breaks down into a number of subproblems. Suppose you want to get from your town to a town 50 miles away. Your principal goal is to get from one location to the other as easily as possible. You soon realize, however, that at the outset some subproblems must be considered. Here is the problem and its subproblems:

Main problem:	How do I get from Town A to Town B?
Subproblems:	What is the most direct route? How far do I travel on the highway? What is the number of the exit I take in leaving the highway?

What seems like a simple primary question can be divided into at least three other questions before the principal question can be resolved. So it is with most research problems. The researcher usually cannot deal with the principal research problem in total. To proceed logically, one should closely inspect the principal problem because research will soon cause the appropriate and, in fact, necessary subproblems to float to the surface. By resolving them, we finally resolve the main problem.

If researchers don't take the time or trouble to isolate the lesser problems within the major problem, their research projects become cumbersome and unwieldy. From a design standpoint, therefore, it is best to reduce the main problem to a series of logical subproblems that, when resolved, will resolve the main problem.

5. Research is guided by the specific research problem, question, or hypothesis. Having stated the problem and the attendant subproblems, each subproblem is then viewed through a construct called a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a logical supposition, a reasonable guess, an educated conjecture. It may direct your thinking to the possible source of information that will aid in resolving the research problem through the resolution of each attendant subproblem.

Hypotheses are nothing new. They are constant, recurring features of every day life. They represent the natural working of the human mind. Something happens. Immediately, you attempt to account for the cause of the happening by constructing a series of reasonable guesses. In so doing, you are hypothesizing. Let's take a commonplace occurrence: You come home after dark, open the front door, and reach inside to turn on the lamp that stands on a nearby table. Your fingers find the switch. You turn it. No light.

At this point, you begin to construct a series of reasonable guesses -- hypotheses -- for the cause of the lamp failure:

1. The bulb has burned out.
2. The lamp is not plugged into the wall outlet.
3. A late afternoon thunderstorm interrupted the electrical service.
4. The wire from the lamp to the wall outlet is defective.
5. You forgot to pay your electric bill.

Each of these hypotheses provides a direction for exploration to locate the information that may resolve the problem of the malfunction. I must mention here that hypotheses are never proved nor disproved; they are either supported or not supported (rejected).

Now, you go in search of information to determine which of your hypotheses may be correct.

1. You go out to your car, get a flashlight, find a new bulb, and insert the new bulb. The lamp fails to light. (Hypothesis 1 is rejected.)
2. You glance down at the wall outlet and see that the lamp is plugged into it. (Hypothesis 2 is rejected.)
3. You look at your neighbors' homes. Everyone has electrical power. (Hypothesis 3 is rejected.)
4. You go back into your home and lift the cord connecting the lamp to the wall outlet. The lamp lights briefly and then goes out. You lift the cord again. Again, the lamp lights briefly. The connecting cord is defective. (Hypothesis 4 is supported.)
5. Fortunately, hypothesis 4 solved the problem and you can count on adequate light to study by for another month.

After the hypotheses comes information (data). The data either support or fail to support the hypotheses.

Many of the greatest discoveries in science have begun as hypotheses. Scientists call hypotheses theories. Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity is essentially a hypothesis. His mathematical equations suggested what only the data could ultimately verify. Take the matter of the nature of light, for example. Einstein postulated that light passes through space as protons -- minute masses of spectral energy -- If light, Einstein reasoned, has mass, then it is subject to the pull of a gravitational field. Einstein proposed his general theory in 1915. A year later K. Schwarzchild produced the first exact solution of the field equations with respect to the gravitational field of the sun. According to the Einstein-Schwarzchild hypothesis rays of light should be deflected twice the amount that Isaac Newton had predicted earlier.

In May 1919, an eclipse of the sun occurred. Members of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, both of London, traveled to Brazil and North Africa to observe the aberration of the light of a distant star, caused by the gravitational field of the sun. After the data were analyzed and interpreted, the results clearly validated Einstein's hypothesis.

6. Research accepts certain critical assumptions. In research, assumptions are equivalent to axioms in geometry-self-evident truths. The assumption must be valid or else the research cannot proceed. For this reason, careful researchers -- certainly in academic research -- set forth a statement of the assumptions as the bedrock upon which the study must rest. In your research, therefore, it is important that others know what you assume with respect to your project. For, if one is to judge the quality of your study, then the knowledge of what you assume as basic to the very existence of your study is vitally important.

An example may clarify the point. Suppose your problem is to investigate whether students are able to learn a language more quickly by learning only one foreign language at a time or by attempting to learn two foreign languages together.

What assumptions would underlie such a problem?

• It would be assumed that the teacher would be competent to teach the language or languages.
• It would be assumed that those students taking part in the research are readily capable of hearing the subtleties of accent and alert to other unique characteristics of the language.
• It would be assumed that the languages selected would have distinguishable characteristics that could be recognized and learned and practiced by the students selected for the study.

A distinction should be made here between a hypothesis and an assumption. A hypothesis is a supposition that is made in order to facilitate the search for facts but that is held in abeyance until the data are available and have been interpreted. At that point, the data either support or do not support the hypothesis. An assumption is quite a different matter. An assumption is a condition that is taken for granted, without which the research situation would be impossible. In the Einstein example given above, we assume that the astronomers who went to observe the aberration of the star's light were competent to do so and that their instruments were critical enough to make the sensitive measurements necessary to detect the slight aberrational difference caused by the gravitational pull so that a valid conclusion could be drawn from them.

Assumptions are usually so self-evident that, many times, we consider it unnecessary to mention them; but, careful researchers do, so that those inspecting the research procedure may see every component and evaluate it accordingly. For the beginning researcher, it is better to be overexplicit than to take too much for granted.

7. Research requires the collection and interpretation of data in attempting to resolve the problem that initiated the research. Having now isolated the problem, divided it into appropriate subproblems, posited reasonable questions or hypotheses, and recognized the assumptions that are basic to the entire effort, the next step is to collect whatever data seem appropriate and to organize them in meaningful ways so that they can be interpreted.

Data, events, happenings, and observations are of themselves only data, events, happenings, and observations -- nothing more. But all these are potentially meaningful. The significance of the data depends on the way the human brain extracts meaning from those data. In research, data unprocessed by the human brain are worthless.

Data demand interpretation. But no rule, no formula, will lead the researcher unerringly to the correct interpretation. Interpretation is subjective: It depends entirely on the logical mind, inductive reasoning skill, and objectivity of the researcher.

Consider the library of books that have been written on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Different historians have studied the same events: One may interpret them one way, and another may arrive at an entirely different conclusion. Which one is right? Perhaps they both are; perhaps neither is. Both may have merely posed new problems for other historians to try to resolve. Different minds frequently see different meanings in the same set of facts. This is an axiom of interpretation that all researchers must recognize.

QUESTIONS

1.      Define the term ‘research’. (10 Marks)

2.      How does ‘academic’ research differ from information gathering? (10 Marks)

3.      Explain why collecting facts from different sources and writing them in a report is not ‘proper’ research. (10 Marks)

4.      Define the term ‘hypothesis’. (10 Marks)

5.      In what ways does a ‘hypothesis’ differ from a ‘research question’? (10 Marks)

6.      Describe how a research problem can be broken down into two or more subproblems. Give an example of your own of a problem that can be broken down into subproblems. (50 Marks).

Deadline Weds 1 February 2012