Dear Jeremy and Chris,

There are many significant instances of students inventing new research methods. By "many," I mean that there are easily several thousand examples of students inventing new research methods among the millions of dissertations and theses that doctoral students have completed since the 19th century. (To speak of these kinds of numbers is no exaggeration. UMI dissertation publishing has published over 2,000,000 dissertations and theses in North America since 1938.) 

Most of the time, students use available research methods. There are three reasons for this. 

The first and most significant of these is the fact that a PhD program involves research training -- learning to do research. One aspect of this involves learning about the array of research methods one might use in one's field, and mastering some of those methods. 

The second is the fact that the doctoral thesis is effectively the journeyman project of an apprentice in the research guild. The purpose of the PhD is not "an original contribution to knowledge." The criterion of an original contribution to knowledge is one criterion that the research student has developed the skill to move from an apprentice doing research under the watchful eye of a master researcher to become a journeyman researcher able to conduct his or her work independently. In many cases, the purpose of a thesis is to fill in a small but significant gap in what we -- the members of a field or disciplines -- know about something. Using a robust and reasonable well known research method allows us to get on with that work.

These two reasons lead to the third. Given the vast array of research methods accessible to us in most instances, there is little reason to invent a new research method. No serious researcher would bother when robust, tested, off-the-shelf methods are ready to hand. This, of course, is why every good doctoral program also includes either formal courses in research methods, methdology, and methodics, or seminars and training. Methods are ways to do things. Methdology is the comoparative study of method. Methodics is the comprehensive body of methods in the practices of a field. 

Given these, I'd support Jeremy's point -- or what I take to be his point -- that there is no reason why an individual student of exceptional rigor and talent cannot invent a new research method. His other point -- edited out -- is that all individuals do this in the social and professional context of a field.

But I support Chris's point, too. No individual research student can invent a whole new methodics for an entire field. To invent a whole body of new research practices would be an astounding achievement for someone who is trying to move from apprentice to journeyman by mastering the challenging array of research methods that already exist, applying one or several of these successfully to answer a question well enough formed and bounded to permit a reasonable answer in the time allocated between entering and completing a doctoral program.

Here, it is vital to recognize the difference between a student (or a student and an inexperienced supervisor) imagining that a student has invented "a whole body of new research practices." 

A case in point would be a doctoral student whose first thesis project involved "inventing" a "new research method" by transforming and adapting a copyrighted research instrument. When I read the proposal, it was clear why the initial university refused to advance this student to candidacy. The revised method ignored and discarded all the rigorous aspects that made the original instrument valid and applicable. And the student did not seem to understand that one cannot adapt and change a copyrighred instrument freely. This student moved on to a supposedly creative art school that awarded him a PhD for a jumbled, rambling thesis with no method in sight, while obviously confused supervisers praised his methdological contribution.

Another case in point is a student who decided to explore creativity in the design process. This astonishing fellow made the claim that there was no prior work in his field so he had to invent his own methods! His professor and supervisor was a designer without a research background or a PhD, and the professor simply accepted the claim. When I visited the university library, a rough search on the subject field demonstrated that his library collection alone held thousands of relevant volumes -- hundreds on the two or three main aspects of what should have been the research problem. A search of the journal literature would have yielded tens of thousands of possible references. This student referred to a handful of items, mostly popular, and even then he missed the classic contributions by key scholars. He also referred to several books that the internal evidence of his comments and citation structure revealed that he could not possibly have read, but these were not books on creativity -- these were titles in the philosophy of science chosen to demonstrate intellectual sophistication and impress unknowing readers.

The student's professor may not have known much about research, but he was a skilled academic politician. He assembled a committee of friendly examiners from other universities who liked his program and wanted to help him graduate his first PhD. The examiners held PhD degrees in technical fields removed from creativity studies. As technologist-designers, they had little familiarity with the past four decades of creativity research. They were dramatically impressed by what they took to be his methdological sophistication and creative skill, as well as by the fact that he often ended seminars or presentations by singing. It never occurred to them that creativity might be an issue well known in psychology and the social sciences. Adding a creativity researcher to the supervision team might have saved the project. Of course, the student would have had to do more work than singing. Adding a psychologist to the examination team would have saved the field an inappropriate graduate.

As it is, the examiners praised this thesis, too, for its methdological creativity. I was less impressed. Most of what I saw was old, and much of it long accessible in other fields. The question was not whether the methods already existed. The question was whether the lack of a proper literature review meant that this student had reinvented the wheel without knowing it or whether he had taken methods and ideas wholesale from the literature, recast them in his own words, and published this as his own work.

These are true stories, told in an abstract enough way to make them hard to recognize. I won't tell the story of the damage and difficulties that followed in the wake of these two PhD students as they float through careers in research. Neither has a university position. One works in special project funded by a large corporation. It will be interesting to see how long that lasts in the current world economy. The singer did so badly as a research supervisor that he floated out of academic life into a new career in industry where he has achieved tremendous success as a high-profile consultant who exciting projects help influential people to make wise, creative decisions. Of course, he doesn't publicize the jobs that don't work very well -- the kind of projects that lead people to think that it's better not to employ people with a PhD in design research. Who knows that the downturn will mean for him? Neither has a future in the workaday world of research where we try to teach and learn something useful about serious problems in the real world.

I did not mean to go on so long on this point. These cases are extreme, but the reason they are extreme is that two students who invented what they thought to be their own methods have managed to do reasonably well selling snake oil. The cautionary aspect of this tale is that they'd have done so much better not trying to invent research methods.

Back when I got my PhD, one of my teachers always made a big point about care with evidence, sources, and methods -- as well as care with such mundane skills as using and citing the literature properly. She had a pithy little quote she learned from her supervisor years before: "Be true to your sources and your sources will be true to you." The same goes for methods.

The debate on creative formats is centuries old. One still hears tales of those legendary old scholars who might write an entire thesis in verse. Kierkegaard had to write a petition for the then-revolutionary privilege of writing his doctoral thesis in Danish rather than Latin. Wittgenstain produced the Tractatus, which was accepted as his thesis. But these are formats, and not methods -- and all these examples are in philosophy.

There is no reasonable way to argue against multiple kinds of evidence in a doctoral thesis, provided that the thesis also includes the metanarratives of research that can only be communicated in words. The point is to master research methods well enough to answer a serious research question or solve an interesting problem, or to adapt or possibly in some rare instance create a method to do so. This would still require a methdology chapter, where one would demonstrate that one understands the methods, methdology, and methodics of the field, linked to a review of the literature that examines the past and present state of the problem. Those who can manage these chapters will grace and rigor may well move on to their own method, having demonstrated reasonably that off-the-shelf methods won't be adequate to the task at hand.

Up to that point, I'd like to know that the student understands the problem -- and understands research methods well enough to demonstrate why he or she can't use existing methods. If existing methods won't work, the next step is demonstrating that a student understands enough methodogy to create a new method -- and enough about methodology and methodics to show why this method is appropriate, in contrast to all those other methods that aren't.

That won't happen merely by singing a few tunes from The Student Prince.

Yours,

Ken

Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

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On Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:34:40 -0500, jeremy hunsinger <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

why can't individual students invent a whole body of new research practices?   

[In response to]

On Dec 13, 2008, at 9:10 AM, Chris Rust wrote:

individual students CANNOT invent a whole body of new research practices on their own