The research process is, for many of us, just the way we do things. We research the best buys in cars and appliances; we research book reviews before book shopping; we research the best schools for our children and ourselves; and we probably perform some kind of research in our jobs. Our search for information may lead us to interview friends or other knowledgeable people; read articles in magazines, journals, or newspapers; listen to the radio; search an encyclopedia on CD-ROM, and even explore the Internet and World Wide Web for information. We use our local public libraries and our school libraries.
Research can be a way of life; it is the basis for many of the important decisions in our lives. Without it, we are deluged with information, subjected to the claims of advertisers, or influenced by hearsay in making sense of the world around us. This informal, experiential research helps us decipher the information flood we encounter daily.
Formal academic research differs from experiential research and may be more investigative in nature. For example, it may require us to learn about an area where we have little knowledge or inclination to learn. It may be library-oriented or field-oriented, depending on the nature of the research.
Academic research, like the everyday research we do, is associated with curiosity and intellectual discovery. The writing associated with academic research is demanding and challenging, with a methodology and discipline all its own. Although many of the concepts and processes of research are generic, academic research is discipline-specific and demands a more rigorous methodology. This chapter presents the methodology of academic research, many of the generic processes of research writing, and suggestions for applying the concepts to various disciplines. The chapter ends with a brief look at the structure of a research paper.
The Research AssignmentWriting an academic research paper can be one of your most valuable and exciting experiences during your college career. To see your ideas take shape on paper and your words join the ongoing conversations about the subject matter, to take your place in the discourse community of a subject area can be a thrilling moment of triumph. You become a junior scholar in the community of scholars and writers who discuss the issues, ideas, literature, and thinkers of the discipline.
Why do many students struggle with research assignments? For many students, the research assignment often starts with a topic their teacher or they select after long hours in the library or online, reading lots of articles or books. These students then struggle to stitch together blocks of information like a sampler patchwork quilt, each block with its own pattern and meaning. Students may wonder why they are rewriting existing information or telling the teacher what he or she already knows. They may ask whether they can add anything new to the discussion of the topic.
Your teacher assigns a research paper in hopes of teaching you how to take part in the intellectual conversations that define the ideas in that discipline. Taking part in those conversations means asking questions that arise out of your own individual curiosity and intellectual temperament and then seeking answers both through your own thinking and the thinking of others. In this way, you can contribute meaningfully to the existing scholarship in that subject area. You are then creating a research space for yourself and for other researchers who may follow you.
Perhaps understanding why the ability to write a research paper is a worthwhile addition to your academic skills will give you a new perspective on the research assignment.
The Research
Assignment
Teachers assign academic research papers primarily to give you experience in:
Research expands and augments your experience and knowledge, providing a broader base for thinking and writing. It enables you to become an expert in areas not directly related to your everyday life. When you engage in research, you build valuable critical skills that serve you in other areas of life. You learn to ask probing and thoughtful questions, gather and interpret data, read critically, form intelligent opinions, and manage and understand conflicting information. As you do research in your chosen specialization, you become an expert in that area. In addition, when you write about your discoveries, others come to respect your knowledge and value your opinion.
The Research Assignment
Not all writing requires research. By the time we reach early adulthood, most of us have formed some opinions and gathered some information that we can impart to others without research. Most of us can write an ordinary letter or essay without the benefit of research.
However, when we are asked to investigate an area about which we may need more detailed knowledge, we may engage in research. Research, a cognitively complex activity, requires some discipline and sophisticated skills. It plays a role in creating knowledge about a subject, managing conflicting information, and thinking about a field of study. Research helps us understand why asking questions is important to our education.
The Research Assignment
How to Evaluate Research Sources
Students today have access to so much information that they need to weigh the reliability of sources. Any resource—print, human, or electronic—used to support your research inquiry has to be evaluated for its credibility and reliability. In other words, you have to exercise some quality control over what you use. When you use the print and multimedia materials found in your college library, your evaluation task is not so complicated because librarians have already established the credibility and appropriateness of those materials for academic research. The marketplace forces publishers to be discriminating as well.
Data collected in interviews of persons whose reliability is not always clearly established should be carefully screened, especially if you present this material as expert opinion or as based on knowledge of your topic. And you may have even more difficulty establishing trustworthiness for electronic sources, especially Web and Internet sources.
Because the Internet and World Wide Web are easy to use and accessible, Web material is volatile—it changes, becomes outdated, or is deleted. Its lack of consistency and sometimes crude form make Web information suspect for people who use it for research. Because there is frequently no quality control over Web information, you must critically evaluate all the material you find there, text and graphics alike.
The following checklist, adapted from "Evaluating Internet Resources" (UMUC, 1998), can be used to evaluate any of your sources, but especially those of the Web. Ask yourself these questions about your sources. The greater number of questions answered yes, the more likely that the source is of high quality.
Authority: Is the authority in this material clear and legitimate? Is the writer qualified?
Accuracy: Can the factual information be verified by legitimate authority? Can one opinion be verified against another?
Objectivity: Is the material objective and free from advertising, bias, and hidden agendas? Is the language impartial? Is the statistical evidence credible?
Currency: Is the material updated frequently to ensure currency? Does the material reflect the most up-to-date research?
Coverage: Is the material complete, partial, or out of context? If the material is out of context, is there a path to find the source? If the material is out of copyright, has it been updated to make it more current?
Research resources are usually thought of as primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources can be firsthand accounts of actual events written by an eyewitness or original literary or artistic works. They may be letters, official records, interviews, survey results, and unanalyzed statistical data. These sources contain raw data and information, such as the original work of art or immediate impressions. Secondary sources, on the other hand, are usually discussions, evaluations, syntheses, and analyses of primary and secondary source information. You will no doubt use both primary and secondary sources throughout your academic career. When you use them and in what combination usually depends on what your research inquiry is and the discipline for which you are writing. If you are unclear which sources to use, ask your teacher for guidance.
Your research resources can come from your experiences; print media, such as books, brochures, journals, magazines, newspapers, and books; and CD-ROMs and other electronic sources, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. They may also come from interviews and surveys you or someone else designs. You may develop your own field research where you collect data through observation or experimentation. For example, before you interview your candidates for a study on adolescent girls, you may use library research to get some background information on adolescent girls and their current issues. You may also want to observe them in a school setting, noting certain behaviors, dress, or mannerisms, depending on your focus. You may also want to review other studies on adolescent girls to see how the studies were conducted and the data interpreted. You may even design a survey to collect firsthand information from the girls themselves or from their teachers.
Your research question and the kind of research you do will guide the types of resources you will need to complete your research. Students today have easy access to a wider range of information than ever before. Conducting research today requires that you understand how to locate resources—in libraries and frequently online—and that you have the skill and motivation to work with librarians and library technology. Identifying and managing those resources within your research project is as important as integrating them into your own words and your research writing voice.
Research Resources
Where Are Research Resources Found?
Research resources are found in various places, both within and outside the traditional library. In addition to the library, your teacher, and other people, broadcast journalism and the Internet and World Wide Web offer rich sources of material and information for your research assignments. When using these sources, you must exercise your critical thinking skills to distinguish credible from not-so-credible information. "Chapter 5: Using Library Resources" is a systematic introduction to library resources addressed to UMUC students.
Research Resources
Where Are Research Resources Found?
Most teachers are well versed in research methods and may be invaluable human resources as you pursue your assignment. They are familiar with the kinds of sources you will need to consult. As subject matter experts, they can guide your research by recommending readings, outside sources, and even topics and subjects related to your research inquiry of which you may be unaware. They can help you address issues of importance in your area of study and avoid researching nonproductive areas. For example, your biology teacher may tell you that conducting library research on cures for AIDS may prove tiresome and inconclusive. He or she may recommend that you focus on two or more recent developments in the search for a cure, starting with representative articles from the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine. This advice can help you focus your research in areas that are productive, authoritative, and up-to-date, saving you hours of valuable time. In addition to your teacher, librarians are invaluable resources for your research.
Among the most useful of tools for conducting research with human resources are interviews, questionnaires, and surveys. For field research, for example, you may need to be able to conduct interviews or design surveys and questionnaires. To discover how to do that, you may talk to your teacher or even consult your library and electronic resources.
Research Resources
Where Are Research Resources
Found?
University and college libraries tend to have more recent and detailed materials, most of which are print resources, than community or other lending libraries. Libraries provide services that enable you to browse their holdings and those of other libraries, as well as to order, locate, and hold books or journal articles. These libraries are also more likely to carry the academic and scholarly books and journals needed in academic research.
In particular, the reference sections of university libraries help you narrow your topic and locate the appropriate sources for review while you plan your research project. In most libraries, a reference librarian will help you find bibliographies, subject indexes, abstracts, and other research tools.
Much of the work you do in the reference section is preliminary to actually reading relevant articles and books or conducting field research. This work nevertheless helps you focus your topic and direction.
Research Resources
Where Are Research Resources Found?
Electronic information is a growing resource today, one many students may overlook. If they are updated regularly, online databases, the primary residence for electronic resources used for research, can be quite valuable because they contain a great deal of information in an accessible place and are often more easily updated than print resources. Today, university libraries store much of their reference information online in some form.
In some libraries, additional information may be contained on individual disks or CD-ROMs, storage devices for electronic information. An example of an online database is the VICTOR database, which lists all the current holdings within the University System of Maryland. Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, on the other hand, is a database that is owned and updated privately and distributed to universities on CD-ROM.
During your research, you will initially be able to access a significant amount of your needed research information from outside the library building, by using a computer and modem. UMUC’s "virtual" or "electronic" library has many databases of abstracts, newspapers, full-text books, and journals, such as the Harvard Business Review, as well as the useful LEXIS/NEXIS database important to business and paralegal studies. Chapter 6, "Using Library Resources," offers more details about library research here at UMUC.
Accessing information is only one step in the research process. Reading, interpreting, analyzing, and selecting information for your paper and using resources in your research writing are important subsequent steps without which you cannot complete the research task.
Planning and Writing a Research Paper
Creating good research writing is demanding, challenging, and exciting. Mastering this complex academic skill prepares you to enter the discourse community of your chosen specialization. Many students struggle with assembling a research paper because it seems overwhelming and mysterious, but the following 10 steps in the process can be practiced and learned.
Structuring the Research Paper
Not all research assignments require a formal organizational structure, but the formal academic research paper usually does. For the less formal assignments, such as essays or short research pieces, you can do well using one of the organizational patterns discussed in Chapter 3, "Thinking Strategies and Patterns of Writing" (Patterns for Presenting Information). Chapter 3 also describes several kinds of academic forms that might be used for less formal research:
Structuring the Research Paper
For emphasis, the primary purposes for formal research are repeated here:
For the formal or primary academic research assignment, where you will take your place in the scholarly conversation, consider an organizational pattern typically used for primary academic research. This organization consists of these sections—introduction, methods, results, discussion, and conclusions and recommendations.
The research paper flows from the general to the specific and back to the general in its organization. The introduction uses a general-to-specific movement in its organization, establishing the thesis and setting the context for the conversation. The methods and results sections are more detailed and specific, providing support for the generalizations made in the introduction. The discussion section moves toward an increasingly more general discussion of the subject leading to the conclusions and recommendations, which then generalize the conversation again.
Many students will find that writing a structured introduction gets them started and gives them the needed focus that significantly improves their entire paper. Usually, you will not actually begin writing here, but in a later section, wherever you think you have the most information. Because introductions are so highly structured, you may actually write your introduction last.
Introductions usually have three parts:
As you can see, a thoughtfully written introduction can provide a blueprint for the entire research paper.
In the first part of the introduction, the presentation of the problem, or the research inquiry, state the problem or express it so that the question is implied. Then, sketch the background on the problem and review the literature on it to give your readers a context to show them how your research inquiry fits into the conversation currently ongoing in your subject area. You may tell why this problem has been a problem, why previous attempts have failed to solve it, or why you think this particular slant or angle to the problem is important. You can also mention what benefits are to be gained from solving this problem or exploring this topic from your perspective.
In the second part of the introduction, state your purpose and focus. Here, you may even present your actual thesis. Sometimes your purpose statement can take the place of the thesis by letting your reader know your intentions. Some writers like to delay presenting their thesis, especially if their readers may not be ready to accept it.
The third part, the summary or overview of the paper, briefly leads readers through the discussion, forecasting the main ideas and giving readers a blueprint for the paper.
This example of a well-organized introduction provides such a blueprint.
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Example of an Introduction Entrepreneurial Marketing: The Critical Difference In an article in the Harvard Business Review, John A. Welsh and Jerry F. White remind us that "a small business is not a little big business." An entrepreneur is not a multinational conglomerate but a profit-seeking individual. To survive, he must have a different outlook and must apply different principles to his endeavors than does the president of a large or even medium-sized corporation. Not only does the scale of small and big businesses differ but small businesses also suffer from what the Harvard Business Review article calls "resource poverty." This is a problem and opportunity that requires an entirely different approach to marketing. Where large ad budgets are not necessary or feasible, where expensive ad production squanders limited capital, where every marketing dollar must do the work of two dollars, if not five dollars or even ten, where a person’s company, capital, and material well-being are all on the line—that is, where guerrilla marketing can save the day and secure the bottom line. (Levinson, 1984, p. 9) |
In this example, the first sentence gives us the general academic conversation that this article will join. Sentence 2 narrows the discussion slightly to the entrepreneur. Sentence 3 explains why the entrepreneur and the small business are different and suggests the research question: How does the entrepreneur with his business principles differ from the corporate CEO and "big business" principles? Sentence 4 again places the discussion here within the academic conversation about entrepreneurs and slants the subject to "resource poverty." Sentence 5 suggests why this issue is significant and even hints that perhaps it hasn’t been covered sufficiently. The author is defining his "research space," where his research will fit in the conversation. The last and longest sentence succinctly summarizes the areas covered in this article and presents the thesis statement ". . . that is, where guerrilla marketing can save the day and secure the bottom line."
As an aside, notice that the title of our example has two parts. Readers use such academic titles to select articles and to get a quick sense of what an article is about. Academic titles can state the research question, summarize the thesis or purpose, or be written as a two-part title with a colon. As in this example, the first part of the title gives the context of the article, the academic discussion, and the second part gives the slant of the article, this writer’s special research space in the conversation.
By reviewing the introductions to research articles in the discipline in which you are writing your research paper, you can get an idea of what is considered the norm for that discipline. Study several of these before you begin your paper so that you know what may be expected. If you are unsure of the kind of introduction your paper needs, ask your teacher for more information. As an added note, the introduction is usually written in present tense.
The methods section of your research paper should describe in detail what methodology and special materials, if any, you used to think through or perform your research. You should include any materials you used or designed for yourself, such as questionnaires or interview questions, to generate data or information for your research paper. You want to include any methodologies that are specific to your particular field of study, such as lab procedures for a lab experiment or data-gathering instruments for field research. If you are writing a literary research paper, you would want to use the methodologies scholars use to examine texts and place the author and the literary piece into its literary and historical context. If you are writing a business management research paper, you would want to use the methodologies that place your discussion in the context of business and economics.
Next to your own critical review of the scholarship in your discipline, your teacher is the best source of what methodologies are used in it. Many writers of research begin with this section because it is often the easiest to write. This section is usually written in past tense.
How you present the results of your research depends on what kind of research you did, your subject matter, and your readers’ expectations. Quantitative information, data that can be measured, can be presented systematically and economically in tables, charts, and graphs. Quantitative information includes quantities and comparisons of sets of data. If you are unfamiliar with the conventions, you may find it challenging to present quantitative findings. You may include some commentary to explain to your reader what your findings are and how to read them.
The distinction between the results section and the discussion section is not always so clear-cut. Although many writers think you should simply present and report your findings on the data you have collected, others believe some evaluation and commentary on your data may be appropriate and even necessary here. You and your teacher can decide how strict you want to be in this decision.
Qualitative information, which includes brief descriptions, explanations, or instructions, can also be presented in prose tables. This kind of descriptive or explanatory information, however, is often presented in essay-like prose or even lists.
There are specific conventions for creating tables, charts, and graphs and organizing the information they contain. In general, you should use these only when you are sure they will enlighten your readers rather than confuse them. In the accompanying explanation and your discussion, always refer to the graphic by number and explain specifically what you are referring to. Give your graphic element a descriptive caption as well. The rule of thumb for presenting a graphic is first to introduce it by name, show it, and then interpret it. You can consult a textbook, such as Lannon’s Technical Writing for more information and guidance. The results section is usually written in past tense.
Your discussion section should generalize on what you have learned from your research. One way to generalize is to explain the consequences or meaning of your results and then make your points that support and refer back to the statements you made in your introduction. Your discussion should be organized so that it relates directly to your thesis. You want to avoid introducing new ideas here or discussing tangential issues not directly related to the exploration and discovery of your thesis. This section, along with the introduction, is usually written in present tense.
Some academic research assignments might end with the discussion and not need a separate conclusions and recommendations section. Often, in shorter assignments, your conclusion is just a paragraph or two added to the discussion section. In many of your research assignments, however, you will be asked to provide your conclusions and recommendations in your research paper.
Conclusions unify your research results and discussion and elaborate on their significance to your thesis. Your conclusion ties your research to your thesis, binding together all the main ideas in your thinking and writing. By presenting the logical outcome of your research and thinking, your conclusion answers your research inquiry for you and your readers. Your conclusions should relate directly to the ideas presented in your introduction section and not present any new ideas.
You may be asked to present your recommendations separately in your research assignment. If so, you will want to add some elements to your conclusion section. For example, you may be asked to recommend a course of action, make a prediction, propose a solution to a problem, offer a judgment, or speculate on the implications and consequences of your ideas. The conclusions and recommendations section is usually written in present tense.
Of course, your research paper is not complete without your list of references. Documenting your research paper to use your sources in a manner that maintains academic integrity is discussed in the next chapter.
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