 |
 |
Hi I'm a long time lurker on this forum & first time poster... I've been prompted to make a comment after reading Chris Rust's post. Chris writes: '...every student should develop a methodology that is theirs and specific to the problem that they investigate. Sadly too many students imagine that the problem of research is to simply select a methodology from a book of available recipes, often before they have made any real progress in understanding their research problem.' Whilst I agree strongly with the assertion about students developing their own specific methodology, I do feel that the tendency to select from a book of available recipes is very often not the student's fault. I am always wary when academics make claims about what students don't do - usually it means we haven't adequately told the student what is expected - or possible! One might also look to the generic nature of some (though not all) university 'research training', and to the plethora of such methodological 'recipe books' brought out by academic presses hungry to capture a few pounds from anxious new PhD researchers. Writing from my own point of view (as a senior lecturer in fine art) I witness a lot of students who have come to PhD research from an existing art practice and who feel incredibly worried about the 'propriety' of their research methodology/s. It is easy for them to feel that the existing approaches they have established are inevitably inadequate to the job and to reach as a result for off the peg methodologies that seem tried & trusted in the field. I'm not sure we are very successful at assuaging these worries. Chris's point about students making methodological decisions 'before they have made any real progress in understanding their research problem' is another interesting one. It makes me think about Bruno Latour's critique of the adoption of frameworks before one has really encountered and described whatever it is that one is studying. (I'm thinking of the interlude between himself and an imagined PhD student that forms a central section in his book 'Reassembling the Social'). I'm curious whether the early requirement to assert one's methodology (as in most university/AHRC?ESRC research applications/registration forms) might be a negative factor in all this. What would happen if this element was articulated differently or at a different point - would that make a positive impact upon the situation Chris correctly identifies?