Week 3 Response

When beginning to read Research Design, I felt like the material clarified, filled in gaps, and gave names to research processes I have done in the past. I felt most familiar with the qualitative material, which made sense since I have never really been in a field which does quantitative research. Even though I was more familiar, I have never done research on “live human subjects” and it was hard to picture myself doing some of these methods with no concrete frame of reference. I anticipate that some of these ideas and processes will make a lot more sense when I begin to draft a research proposal.

The readings for this week focused on the introductory material and the purpose statement and research question being asked. The idea that qualitative questions are “exploratory” came up once again and the importance of being narrow in the focus of the research was emphasized. I thought the examples of actual studies were helpful to read. It was enlightening to see how long the introductions actually are – I thought the introductions I did for other papers were too long, but they are nothing compared to what is expected here. Of course, you need to cover so many things in the introduction, according to this book, it has to be long.

There was one part of the section which said something like it was necessary to include almost a dozen sources within the first page; this was one part I found hard to imagine. To me, it sounds like simply listing, or name dropping. How could you possibly discuss (even a little) that many sources in One page? The part where the author mentioned making broad assertions about the literature based on a chart of the research seemed to make more sense than listing every single one of the authors that you might anticipate using in a lengthy paper.

The next section was dealing with the purpose statement which is differentiated from the research question in that it “sets forth the intent of the study, not the problem or issue leading to a need for the study” (111).  I think once I start writing, the templates offered here will be very useful. For a research question, having just one central question was emphasized again for qualitative studies (which I focused on, thinking this is probably what I will do in my research) with the addition of sub-questions relating to the main question. By the end of this point in the introduction, it seems the study will still be very broadly defined in terms of theory and methods, but as much specificity as possible should be included, like the participants, the site, and specific types of research like interviewing or surveys.