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Researching Writing
An Introduction to Research Methods
By Joyce Kinkead University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-479-9
CHAPTER 1
The Research Process
WHY DO RESEARCH?
Researchers are curious. They wish to know the why or how of an issue, and they hope the findings of their research result in additional knowledge and, perhaps, even make a difference. Being a researcher means seeing more intensely. Research also has the power to change people. It can be, in fact, a transformative experience, as the investigator is empowered to pose questions, design studies, investigate, report on results, and recommend alterations in policy or practice. Thus, research adds to the knowledge base of the field of study and has the potential for significant impact.
Hardly anyone worries about polio now, as the vaccination Dr. Jonas Salk developed in 1955 meant people could avoid the devastating disease. But prior to 1955, polio literally terrorized the nation, reaching epidemic proportions with almost sixty thousand cases in 1952. Many people died or were crippled for life. Some were placed in machines called iron lungs that helped them breathe, as they could not breathe on their own. As a child, I watched a television show that featured an adult in an iron lung. Talk about claustrophobia. The disease affected children primarily, but adults, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, were also victims. The subject of Andrew Wyeth's painting Christina's World was a polio victim. The well-known violinist Itzhak Perlman performs sitting due to the debilitating effects of the disease. Dr. Salk began working on a vaccine in 1948. When it proved successful, he was hailed as a hero, yet he refused to profit by taking out a patent on the drug.
While Dr. Salk's research was scientific, the current research that seeks to eradicate polio worldwide is sociocultural. It seemed at one time that polio could be completely eliminated; however, lore about the vaccine permeated some rural areas around the globe, particularly those populated by people with Muslim beliefs, that the vaccine would hurt children. As a result, hundreds of cases still appear. But with researchers working through community and religious organizations to educate leaders about the devastating effects of the disease and the value of the vaccine, the number of cases is decreasing in some areas of the world, a hopeful sign.
Humanistic research plays a role in the fight against polio, too. Technical communicators design appropriate technical documentation to educate and inform community members. Researchers such as Rebecca Walton note that standard technical documentation that puts the facts forward to users may not be effective. Instead, technical communicators do a needs assessment of the issue and then design appropriate documentation for the specific purpose. This may include showing people in familiar garb and surroundings. Such an approach brings the situation closer to being recognizable by users. The power of narrative and storytelling may also be evoked in effective documentation. Walton (2013; Walton, Zraly, and Mugengana 2015) works in user-centered design, and her particular interest is enhancing technical communication in third-world countries.
Researchers are working at this very minute trying to find cures for Alzheimer's disease, cancer, and even the common cold. Research in health-related issues is a high priority for any nation, as it contributes to economic, social, and personal well-being. The United States is known particularly for its research in health, defense, technology, energy, and space exploration. And, over half the nation's basic research is undertaken at its colleges and universities.
Students who engage in research are helping to ask questions and solve problems in a wide range of fields. This is important work. In addition, students benefit in multiple ways. Undergraduate research has been identified as a "high impact" practice by researcher George Kuh (2008, 20) and his team, who, through the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), found that many colleges and universities provide research experiences for students in all disciplines. Students' early and active involvement in systematic investigation and research offers a "sense of excitement that comes from working to answer important questions." Students grapple with "actively contested questions, empirical observation, and cutting-edge technologies."
Personally, students gain tremendously when engaging in research. The following attributes have been substantiated by researchers such as David-Lopatto (2009) and Laursen et al. (2010). Student researchers benefit by
• experiencing the rewards of designing a project, making discoveries, and sharing findings;
• understanding some of the ways in which research differs across disciplines;
• increasing ability to think, learn, and work independently;
• strengthening oral and written communication skills;
• sharpening critical thinking skills;
• developing close relationships with faculty mentors;
• preparing for graduate school;
• getting work published;
• traveling to conferences and working with people who share their interests;
• enhancing a resume;
• participating in and contributing to the life of their chosen field.
Participation in research has the capability of increasing students' sense of responsibility and independence, yet it provides experience in learning to work as members of a team when a project is done collaboratively with other students or with faculty mentors. It can also help clarify career goals. Is this what I wish to do with my life? And even if the subject matter differs from the postgraduation job, research skills are transferable to other settings. Employers consistently cite good communication skills, problem solving, facility with technology, and the ability to work with others as highly valued attributes.
WHY DO RESEARCH IN WRITING?
Charles Bazerman (2007) argues that the study of writing is the study of "how people come to take on the thought, practice, perspective, and orientation of various ways of life; how they integrate or keep distinct those perspectives in which they are practiced; and how we organize our modern way of life economically, intellectually, socially, interpersonally, managerially, and politically through the medium of texts" (35). Throughout history, to be literate has been key to a person's success. Writing is not only about personal success but also about a person's well-being. It can be used to discover oneself, to write one's way through problems, and to communicate feelings.
Writing is what makes us human.
Important studies in writing have changed the way writing is taught from an emphasis on product to an emphasis on process. They have also helped teachers understand how students become literate or why they make errors. These studies have argued for valuing alternative voices. They have explored digital environments and the intersections of technology and rhetoric. They have gone outside academe to explore writing in business settings. They have analyzed how writers collaborate.
Writing studies is a capacious field. Researchers do not necessarily need to be studying or majoring in English. Writing belongs to everyone. A psychology major can study the differences in writing done by clinical and research psychologists, a premed student can study how physicians use information technology to improve communication with patients, a business major can study how a hotel chain uses comments on customer feedback forms in its reports or in the employee newsletter, a student in ethnic studies can research newspaper representations of local civil-rights activists.
So many topics call to the researcher for investigation: authorship, collaboration, intertextuality, visual rhetoric, digital and multimedia platforms, narrative, storytelling, gender and writing, race and writing, social class and writing, writing and power. The possibilities are really limitless.
THE RESEARCH PROCESS
The goal of this textbook is for students to engage in authentic or real research. You may have experience in writing research papers that draw exclusively on others' previous research. Much of "school" research looks at what is termed secondary research sources. This is material written about others' research. Primary research resources are the original studies or documents. For instance, if you were to study tribal-school diaries housed in a special collections or archives, you would be looking at primary documents. Your writing about these diaries then becomes primary research. When another scholar incorporates your work into an analysis, that is secondary research.
Writing academic research papers, whether in secondary school or college, has the benefit of introducing the research process to the writer and providing practice in the skills of finding information and citing sources. In some cases it can be seen as regurgitating information found in common sources such as Wikipedia or popular media. These can be valuable foundational experiences. Please understand that the research you will do as a result of reading this book differs. The goal is to produce research that contributes to our understanding of writing studies.
Research is considered to add new knowledge and as such is termed a discovery activity. This means information is collected systematically and then analyzed for findings. These findings can influence practice and policy. For some researchers a study is not so much about discovering new knowledge as about adding to the conversation; it may take compiling several studies before new knowledge is discovered.
The overarching goal is for research to meet RAD criteria: replicable, aggregable, and data supported. Let's look at each of those terms. Replicable means another researcher can repeat the study and get the same results. This lends to the study's validity. Aggregable means the study can be associated with others or compiled to arrive at even richer interpretations. In other words, it fits in with a group of studies. Data supported refers to the fact that the study draws on evidence, usually quantitative evidence, that supports the conclusions made by the research.
The hope is that research offers the opportunity to generalize from specific instances. Most research contributes to generalizable knowledge. How can the results have an effect on, let's say, another college not in the same state? Federal regulations define research as a "systematic investigation, including research development, testing, and evaluation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge." Some qualitative studies that may not directly "contribute to generalizable knowledge" are still research. In addition, course research assignments conducted by students may be research even if they are limited in scope. Generalizable knowledge is knowledge "expressed in theories, principles, and statements of relationships" that can be widely applied to our experiences (Code of Federal Regulations 2009). Generalizable knowledge is usually shared with others through presentations and publications. Audience members or readers of the research may experience a flash of recognition and say, "Oh, that has implications for my own work."
The research process is a series of stages. But as Flower and Hayes (1981) found with the writing process, it's not just prewriting, writing, and rewriting. It's a recursive process in which the writer loops back to earlier stages. While the research process is more complex than writing an essay, it has that same characteristic of recursiveness. The project may be reviewed and revised numerous times before it reaches its conclusion. Think about it as a looping process, constantly winding back on itself. A misperception among novice researchers is that experienced researchers never make a misstep. That is simply not true. Expert researchers have become skilled through practice and feedback from mentors.
Ranjit Kumar (2014, 34) offers an "eight-step model" for the research process. As he remarks, "The eight steps cover the complete spectrum of a research endeavour, from problem formulation through to writing a research report." The figure below summarizes the eight steps with the use of arrows.
While a step-by-step guaranteed process would be ideal, and Kumar's model is helpful, fortunately or unfortunately, that's not the way it works in real research. Researchers experience failures, they change their minds about design based on information gained in the process, they decide the study is operationally flawed. Recursiveness is common, and the student researcher should not feel discouraged if a project does not truly follow step by step to success. As teachers, we sometimes simplify such processes for novices, as we don't want research to seem overwhelming, but the nature of authentic research in which the researcher reassesses throughout can strengthen the final results.
Profile of a Student Researcher: Sara Calicchia
To illustrate how a researcher uses recursiveness to advantage, let's look at Sara, a student who was enrolled in an honors seminar on researching writing with special attention to writing in the disciplines. Sara was majoring in equine science, and she had represented the university in the National Equestrian Challenge. She also worked in the ruminant nutrition laboratory. She was able to study the digestive system of a cow that has been surgically fitted with a cannula, which is similar to a porthole that allows access to the rumen. She was focusing on epigenetics for her undergraduate honors thesis. With that background, I assumed Sara would be interested in doing a project focused on scientific writing. I was rather surprised that, instead, she was curious about how music affects writers. She knew music was important to her own composing process and wanted to investigate whether that were true for others.
Sara conducted a case study through interviews with twelve subjects — nine professors and three students at her university in the fields of English, biology, and history. Through her research she determined that experienced writers tend to prefer silence or white noise to lyrical music to produce their work. These results show that some of the problems students may find with writing may stem from an overwhelming number of distractions hindering their writing abilities. Sara's progress did not necessarily flow in a step-by-step progression. Although she carefully crafted her interview questions, she found that she needed to return to her participants for a follow-up question about their own ability to play a musical instrument. And, she made a late-stage breakthrough in understanding her project when she returned to review further literature, finding an important article on "environmental self-regulation" that she saidwas enlightening and changed the way her final report was conceived and structured.
Sara disseminated her research in three venues: the state conference on undergraduate research, the National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR), and Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric (YSW). The process for publishing her research report reveals that even when an essay is accepted, revisions can continue. "To 'Play That Funky Music' or Not: How Music Affects the Environmental Self-Regulation of High-Ability Academic Writers" was revised dramatically for publication. YSW has a system whereby an editorial board member is assigned to authors whose work is accepted by the journal. Sara received a detailed message about her submission; it read in part,
The reasons we liked your piece so much have to do with its subject of study, your intriguing methodological approach to that study, the quality of your literature review, and the well-structured organization of the piece, which was therefore highly readable and interesting. Personally, I have a long-running fascination with the relationship of music and writing and the role of music for various writers in the writing process — it's an important area of study, definitely under-developed, and your article will truly be able to contribute to the field's knowledge on this subject. Your idea for comparing, through careful surveying/interviewing, faculty writing habits and undergraduate writing habits, and the way that you lay out the results in your piece, is really smart and works well for the kind of knowledge you're trying to develop. And you did an unusually good job of locating your study within existing conversation in the field, including beautifully setting up the open question of why some studies show music as an impediment while others show music as enhancing the thinking that underlies the writing process. In short, many excellent qualities come together to make this piece attractive to us at YSW, and suggest that with development in some other areas, it will be a terrific addition to this volume.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Researching Writing by Joyce Kinkead. Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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