Academic Disciplines And Their Approaches to Research

For me, the most helpful way of understanding the wide assortment of approaches to research used in the academic worked came from a comment by ____[] in______. He commented that while the disciplines at a University stood in splendid isolation from each other, research methodologies cut across their boundaries creating a needed cross-fertilization between the disciplines. Of course, the various disciplines put their own distinctive spin on the various research methodologies, but these methodologies each retain a certain core process across the disciplines.

The Disciplines

The University is divided into disciplines, but as the name "university" implies, there is a "unity" underneath all the diversity. Members of a university community could be compared to a group of people, each with a fork, eating the same pie. Each person starts in from a different side of the pie, but eventually all meet in the middle. In the same way, people from different disciplines look at life or aspects of life from different perspectives depending on which aspect is of most interest to them.

The disciplines are clustered into three large areas of knowledge:

In addition, some people prefer to explore a single theme, examining how the theme is represented from the perspective of several disciplines. This approach is referred to by terms such as Inter-disciplinary Interests.

The Professions are built upon, or have their roots in one or more of these areas of knowledge, and focus their interests around a specific activity.

Dr. Ken Bessant [] noted that most researchers within a given discipline, even when dispersed geographically, tend to run in packs. They attempt to work together on a specific area of interest, trading information and leads back and forth amongst themselves. He stated that there are usually a number of researchers out on the edges of these packs, exploring new frontiers or subject areas.

_____[] notes that research methodologies in a given discipline at a given time tend to be regarded as acceptable (or unacceptable) by a kind of loose consensus amongst the current members of the pack.

1. Schools of Thought Within and Across Disciplines

Over the years, schools of thought have emerged both within and across disciplines in the academic community. A particular theorist's outlook becomes an overriding philosophical outlook, profoundly affecting such things as:

In some cases, such schools of thought have become thoroughly entrenched traditions, excluding as much research with their walls as they reinforce by their existence. The trouble with such rigidity, especially if long lasting, is that the amount of effort needed to break through it when it outlives its usefulness often creates a backlash almost as problematic as the original framework.

One very old case of this rigidity and reaction can still be seen in the academic establishment. In the years leading up to the renaissance, the Mediaeval Church dominated the research scene, limiting the extent of enquiry, and punishing the offenders. When the Renaissance thinkers finally broke through this [in this case theologically-dominated] barrier to unfettered exploration, the reaction that followed was so severe, that, for the new researchers, only the empirically verifiable was viewed as legitimate fodder for research. Further, believing that experimenter effect on one's experiments could be controlled by sheer dint of human will power and due diligence, such researchers believed that what they found was indeed "fact", found without bias.

One of the greatest services rendered to the academic community in the past few decades has been the emergence of groups of (often strident) researchers who have insisted on such things as

Such researchers have swept into the academic world and have insisted on developing new methodologies of research in order to tease out the shape of formerly written-off phenomena, and have insisted on their right to do so.

These new researchers also have their philosophical schools, such s the post-modernism(s), and social groupings. However, far from denying this fact, such schools frequently flaunt their biases, and the impact of their presence on their own research. They claim that it is more helpful to put ones biasing effects out front where they can be discounted by the readers, than to either pretent there is no outside contaminating effect, or to avoid such research all together.

Although the stridency one sometimes finds amongst such researchers is understandable, one sometimes gets the feeling that we are in for another case of rigid tradition with its resulting over-reaction in the future. As the initial froth of conflict between these outlooks on research dies down somewhat, perhaps another way of framing these traditions can be seen.

Personally, I find that much of this difference of approach is made comprehensible when one considers the three great areas of knowledge in the academic world as lying on a matrix rather than on a continuum. When things are looked at on a continuum or line graph, it becomes a zero-sum game. If one side is going to have influence, the other side has to lose ground. If one is going to concede a point, one must surrender ground gained along a different dimension.

Once we construct a matrix, two (or more) variables can be plotted with gains in one not necessarily creating gains or losses along the other axis. So if we construct an axis with physical world along the x-axis and the non-physical world along the y-axis, we would find the humanities and their research interests stretching up the vertical axis while the hard sciences stretched along the horizontal axis. The social sciences, which endeavor to explore in both directions, would fall somewhere in the middle ground, pushing for both "rise and run" in their quest. Such a model would allow us to "self-situate" our research and our interests within the larger academic world without having to deny or reject the work or interests of other researchers, or spend inordinate amounts of time justifying one's right to be so situated.

Researchers could then be informed by the insights, processes and cautions of workers along the other dimension and incorporate such learnings without giving up the "height or breadth" of experience or conviction along the axis they have already moved. _____made the comment that quantitative research methods are really just a version of qualitative methods.[] Such a statement was a bit extreme, but perhaps he(?) was attempting to address the same phenomenon. Qualitative and quantitative research are admixed more than their adherents would sometimes like to admit. Perhaps this model would frame this relationship in such a way that such a possibility could be explored and discussed.

2. and 3. Research Methodologies and Methods Across the Disciplines

The various research methodologies (sometimes called strategies or approaches to research) and research methods (tactical methods of gathering and analyzing data, often used within a variety of methodologies) are viewed differently by researchers along these two axis. The differences now become more understandable.

4. Data Analysis

Methods of data analysis are derived from the questions which predominate within each of the disciplines and/or philosophical traditions. For example: In order for users of these types of analysis to have some material to operate on, data of certain types, made available in certain formats and according to certain procedures is both
The selection of data gathering method therefore is driven by the form of analysis that is to be used upon the collected data. The new researchers are quite right in pointing out that one's
shape the data collected to a greater extent than many would care to admit. Even those researchers who choose to go in and "let the data speak to them", are affected by their personal sets of research capabilities, I suspect, and therefore can only hear some of what such data may in fact be "speaking to them".

5. (Re-)Presentation of Data

The very formats in which data and the analytical observations and conclusions are presented (or re-presented) to others, is also affected by this chain of preference on the part of the researchers. For example, some researchers claim their results are their own and are unbiased, so just "present them" as fact. Those who feel that their research is affected by their interconnectedness with their living "subjects", will often go to great lengths to consult with their subjects on both interpretations and permission to re-present the data in the way the researcher experienced it.