Brainerd Prince
This article continues our conversation on research methodology. In the last column, I introduced the idea of eyes and hands as two parts of methodology for any research. We had a little introduction to how eyes work. What does it mean to have eyes in terms of research methodology? This is called the yellow bucket.
The language of red, green, and yellow we use is inspired by the traffic lights. The posture that drivers have for each of these lights can be correlated to research postures. Red is a stop. A research question stops us in our tracks. It makes us stop doing whatever we are doing so that we can focus on addressing it. A question stops our inquiry. It makes us stand still and get absorbed in that question. Hence, the red light is a good analogy for the research question.
Green is a go, and that's why green is for the object of research where you get answers, where you need to really go into the data. You need to collect it, analyse it. You need to find everything you can find about the phenomenon, person, text, experiment in order to get the solution and the answer to the research question. So hence, the green bucket.
And yellow stands for getting ready. If you were driving a manual-gear car, then you would shift your gears. You would press down your clutch and have your other foot on the accelerator. You're ready to move and if you're going to take a right, then the right indicator is on. If you're going to take a left, it's a left indicator. If you're going to go straight, then you get the car ready for motion. Similarly, the yellow bucket refers to the methodology with its eyes and hands, which helps us go towards the green -- towards the solution. And in some sense, it bridges. It moves us from the stop to the go. Hence the colours of red, yellow, green seem quite appropriate to look at the three different components of research.
Now why buckets? The language of the bucket for me stands for discourses. Buckets are something that can carry things. And we say yellow bucket because the bucket is full of texts. It's full of discourses. It's full of different authors, and different sorts of academic sources which talk about it. The bucket, therefore, is an analogy for a discourse, an academic conversation.
Let's focus a bit more and dive a little deeper into the idea of research methodology being eyes and hands. So far, you have acknowledged and set out the question. You have identified the object of research from where you're going to get a solution, and you're not the first person with a similar question nor are you the first person to research on the object of research. In my own journey of research, I was not the first one asking about the nature of religion and its relationship to secularism. Neither was I the first one to research the texts written by Sri Aurobindo. There are many who went ahead of me and many who have come after me in researching these topics.
The eyes refer to how you see it. So what we are already assuming is that the object of research is there, for me, say, it was Aurobindo's text, and you can read it through a variety of frameworks. You could read it even if it were to answer the same question. You could use a variety of concepts through which you interpret the text, the Aurobindoian text. Similarly for any other research, you can interpret the object of research, the data that you collect through a variety of ways.
And the question here is, what is your unique interpretation of the data? What do you want the data to say? What peculiar patterns are you looking at within the dataset? Because plenty of different other patterns can also be excavated from the same dataset. Perhaps in the humanities, where we deal with text or people, which again boils down to text, this bit is more pronounced. Why? Because all texts have to be read through a lens. If you do a Marxist reading, you will get a certain angle. If you do a feminist reading, you'll get a slightly different angle. And if you do a post colonial reading, it will be quite different again.
You could also do a Foucauldian reading, a Derridian reading. What that means is you could use a person's philosophy as your conceptual framework. A Hegelian reading, a Kantian reading, a Nietzschean reading, a Heideggerian reading, and each time you use a different framework.
So the framework is something that you as a researcher choose. This is where I believe a key novelty lies in every research, because your data will be analysed and your results will come out in light of the framework you use. What is a framework? It's a matrix of variables. So when you use these various concepts or variables, then that's what you would measure.
Before we go into how to choose one's framework, let's talk about what the framework does for us. It does three things. Firstly, the framework is able to guide a response to the research question. What I mean by that is, in principle, your framework or your approach, your lens correlates with the question asked so that what you say through it will be a satisfactory answer to the question. So there must be a correlation. You cannot have a framework that is completely disconnected from the research question. The language has to match in some sense.
Secondly, the framework has to be relevant to the object of research, the data, the solution data, the pool of data that gives the solutions. The measure that you bring, the framework that you bring, must correlate with the data you want to analyse. You cannot use inches and centimetres to measure the weight of an object. If you're interested in the weight, then you use a framework that will help you get an interpretation of weight. There has to be a correlation so that the framework is able to make sense of the data and is able to analyse it and is able to give new insights.
And finally, the framework is directly related to the argument that you're advancing. Matter of fact, the framework itself is integral to your argument. What we mean by that is that the language of the framework already reveals the line of argument you're going to take. So it is not merely a tool which connects the question to the answer or which helps to analyse data, but it's actually the way you see the answer, the way you see a response to the question raised.
If these are the three things that the framework does for us, helps us to move from the question to the answer, helps us to analyse the discourse, the object of research, and as well as helps us to put forward our argument, gives language for our argument, then how do we choose a framework? In my view, this is the most creative as well as the most explorative part of the entire research journey. That said, your ultimate framework that you actually work with may not be the first one that you begin with.
Often when we work with small pieces of your research, particular objectives to be fulfilled, we use different frameworks to work with data and analyse them. But particularly when we talk about research at the length of a doctoral research or a full fledged dissertation writing, then it takes time for the researcher to get soaked in both the questioning discourse and the answering discourse. It's only when our familiarity with both has reached a certain degree that we're able to think of what new angle and perspective we can bring to an argument. And in aid of that, we are able to choose an appropriate framework.
Sometimes we do shorter research, like an undergraduate dissertation or a research project, which ends up with 6,000 to 8,000 words. In such a case, we might be addressing a very specific question within a very set discourse, then the available frameworks are already defined for a certain body of work. If your work is incremental, that is if your research is producing incremental new knowledge, you're adding something to an existing stream of knowledge, then the main frameworks don't change.
However, if you're doing disruptive research, you're bringing about a completely new way of thinking about something, then your framework becomes of utmost importance because that is the foundation of your novelty. And you will have to defend why you chose the framework that you did. Because all your data and its analysis and the insights and your argument will be couched in the language of your framework, will be directly influenced by the framework you choose.
So today, hopefully, we have looked with a little more focus on choosing the right lens, the right eyes through which we will answer the research question as well as engage with the answering discourse in terms of data that is collected and analysed. In the next column, we will look more at the hands of the methodology which has to do with the collection and analysis of data.
So the big thought for us is, what sort of research are we doing? Is it incremental or disruptive? Although in both cases you need your eyes, yet in disruptive research, your eyes would see things very differently from how things have been seen within your own discipline so far. If it is incremental research, then the main overall site would remain quite similar to past researchers, even if in the particular case, your framework is unique and is able to add a new level of knowledge to what already exists.
Dr Brainerd Prince is an Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Thinking, Language, and Communication (CTLC) at Plaksha University, Mohali.
