The research Process

Processes of research by Jonathan Guy

In this essay I will outline the primary methods of conducting research, their advantages and disadvantages and will outline where they are best utilised. In addition to this, I will select certain methods of research that I believe will be applicable to my own dissertation and state why I will use those particular methods to conduct my own research.

The first question we should ask is what is research? John C. Merriam considers research as “a reaching out to bring together, organise and interpret what ever may be added to our store of knowledge…most truly exemplified when it involves the wider relationship of specific facts to the whole structure of knowledge”. (C. Merriam, 1941, pg890) In other words, something should be considered research when it adds to what we already know, especially if it does so through adding facts to out structure of knowledge. Obviously, this is but one definition of research, there being much contention over what research actually is, or what should constitute research, however, as a simple definition, this should suffice. This being the cases, what is the purpose of research and what do we gain from it?

Wilson Gee writes in “The Research Spirit” that he believes the purpose of research is to advance the human cause, “it is not strange that the world appraises so highly the research spirit which has led it through the darkness of a past into the light of a present and will still guide it on beyond a golden dawn of a future” (Wilson Gee, 1915, pg 95-98). He believed the primary purpose of research itself was to search for the truth bringing to light new facts as well as reinterpreting old ones. Its purpose with regards to what we have gained from it is visible all around us. If the enlightened few has not proposed and conducted empirical research (people such as D. Hume, I. Kant, C. Darwin, I. Newton etc) of centuries past, if they had not begun “systematic studies of natural phenomena” from which man gained “not only insight into, but a great measure of control over, the physical universe, quite beyond the wildest dreams of the earliest pioneers in these fields” (Wilson Gee, 1950, Pg 179), it is arguable we would still be a religious driven, superstitious backwards people in a feudalist society, never advancing our search for knowledge, happy in our ignorance. To further state its impo...

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...y offer the greatest advantage to me when writing my dissertation.

Biblography (contains direct text references and references from within texts, web references, article references etc)

John c. Merriam, “common arms of culture and research in the university”, Science, 1941

Wilson Gee, Social Science Research Methods, The University of Virginia Press, 1950

Wilson Gee, The research spirit, The Emory Phoenix (Emory University, Oxford, Georgia), 1915

John C. Merriam, Institutes for Research in the Natural Sciences, The University of Chicago Press, 1929

Social and Political Science Research Methods, Madan Lal Goel and V. B. Singh, Ajanta books international, 1996

Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science (A. & C. Black, London, 1911)

A. Wolf, Essentials of Scientific Method, The Machmillan Company, New York, 1938.

Clifford R. Shaw, “Case Study Method”, Publications of the Sociology Society, 1927

Philip Sargant Florence, The Statistical Method in Economic and Political Science (Routledge and Kegan Paul, ltd, London), 1929

Shelby M. Harrison, A bibliography of social surveys, Russell Sage Foundations, 1930

A. D. Ritchie, Scientific Method, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, ltd, London), 1923