What is Research?
Simply put, research is answering a question by obtaining information. But in reality, research needs not only to solve the problem you want to solve, but also to consider whether it can help others and have an impact on the society. Research thus includes the steps of presenting and reporting.
If you are new to research, you may think that your paper will add little to the world’s knowledge. But done well, it will add a lot to your knowledge and to your ability to communicate that knowledge. As we learn to do our own research, we also learn to use and judge that of others.
A research project begins well before you search the internet and continues long after you have collected all the data you think you need. In all research projects, there are five general aims:
- Ask a question worth answering.
- Find an answer that you can support with good reasons.
- Find good data that you can use as reliable evidence to support your reasons.
- Draft an argument that makes a good case for your answer.
- Revise that draft until readers will think you met the first four goals.
Research projects would be much easier if we could march straight through these steps; however, the truth is, research is messy and unpredictable. Frequently we must go back to the earlier step when things become out of control. But the uncertainty of the research is what makes it exciting and utimately rewarding!
Practical and Conceptual Problems
There are two kinds of research problems: practical and conceptual. Each of them has a two-part structure:
- a situation or condition, and
- undesirable costs or consequences caused by the condition.
What differentiates practical and conceptual problems is the nature of those conditions and costs/consequences.
| Practical Problem | Conceptual Problem | |
|---|---|---|
| Condition | Any state of affairs in the world that troubles you or, better, your readers. | Some versions of not knowing or understanding something. |
| Costs/ Consequences | Some tangible effects we don’t like: inconvenience, expense, pain, even death. | No cost but consequence — a kind of ignorance. If we haven’t answered this question, we can’t answer another more important one. |
In short, practical problems concern what we should do; conceptual problems concern what we should think. Practical problems are most common in the professional world; conceptual problems are msot common in academe.
Pure and Applied Research
We call research pure when it addresses a conceptual problem that does not have any direct practical consequences, when it only improves the understanding of a community of researchers. We call research applied when it addresses a conceptual problem that does have practical consequences. You can distinguish them by asking such a question: is it about understanding or doing?
Applied research is common in academic fields such as business, engineering, and medicine and in companies and government agencies that do research to understand what must be known before they can solve a problem.
Most researchers may be uneasy with pure research because the consequence of a conceptual problem — not knowing something — seems so abstract. Since they are not yet part of a community that cares deeply about understanding part of the world, they feel that their findings aren’t good enough. So they try to show the importance of their conceptual answer by cobbling onto it an implausible practical use.
So, during your research progress, resist the urge to turn a conceptual problem into a practical one. You are unlikely to solve any genuine practical problem in a course project. And in any case, most academic researchers see their mission not as fixing the problems of the world but as understanding them better (which may or may not lead to fixing them).
Working Hypothesis
Once you have a quesiton, before get deep into the research project, imagine some plausible answers, no matter how sketchy or speculative. At this stage, don’t worry whether they are right. That comes later.
If one answer seems promising, call it your working hypothesis and use it to guide your research. A tentative working hypothesis can help you think about the kind of data you’ll need as evidence to support it. In fact, until you have a hypothesis, you can’t know whether any data you collect is useful to your project.
But don’t fall too hard for your first hypotheis: the more you like it, the less easily you’ll see its flaws. Make sure it will not blind you to a better one and you need to give it up when evidence says you should.