Hi Cameron,
I'd suggest 'fixation' applies as much to researchers as anyone. And hell
yes, it applies in spades as a criticism to Humanities research.
One warning indicator is when people talk about 'research methods', rather
than data collection or data analysis methods.
A simple test is describe the same research problem in different ways to
different researchers and ask them which 'research method' is most
appropriate. You can watch how each researcher chooses the research methods
dependent on the words you use early in the description. Heck, you can even
play around with it and choose words that will trigger particular responses
- give yourself a score on whether you predicted right.
With a bit of care you can even persuade thousands of researchers that
methods of formatting data are design methods...just by choosing the words
that will trigger particular fixation behaviours. I've published about this
in relation to a university design research website
Worse still perhaps is when individual researchers trigger the fixations
about choice of research in themselves and are convinced that particular
research methods are appropriate just because of the way the research has
been encultured to describe a problem to themselves (to a hammer everything
looks like a nail. Historians analyse things according to the cultures of
history research. .. etc)
Perhaps worst of all is when a researcher lets an email trigger a fixation
to argue that things could be different or better ;-)
Also, to back up Don, citations have multiple roles besides offering a short
form for someone else's reasoning. One is more about RTFM; and those sorts
of citations are perhaps more politely omitted.
Cheers,
Terry
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - On Behalf Of cameron tonkinwise
Snip>
Presumably research training is about teaching people precisely to avoid
prejudices such as functional fixedness ... when a sentence seems to be
rubbishing the entirety of the human sciences.
Cameron
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