Page 16 - DLIS401_METHODOLOGY_OF_RESEARCH_AND_STATISTICAL_TECHNIQUES

Unit 1: Concept of Research

This will ensure that each new study does its utmost to add in an orderly fashion to the sum Notes
of knowledge. However, there are many other social scientists who are equally convinced that
this style of formulating problems tends to stifle questions and prevent discoveries that a more
openended approach might stimulate.
This latter group argues instead for letting problems and hypotheses emerge throughout the
research process, pushed forth by new empirical observations that encourage the researcher
to ask new questions and build new theories. For example, Schatzman and Strauss (1973)
write— "The automatic use of formally stated hypotheses, and of statements of 'the problem'
may make it easier to program action, but it will also limit the kinds of experience that he (the
researcher) will tolerate and deal with. In original research there is less likely to be a conceptual
closure to inquiry, for as the work of discovery continues and new kinds of data are conceptualized,
new problems and hypotheses will emerge. Consequently far from putting a closure on his
new experience the researcher will modify his problem and hypotheses—if indeed he ever
stated them explicitly—arrange to handle new ones simultaneously with the old, or do so in
serial order. This is how the relationship between the observer and the observed object is
altered, and how it becomes possible for new questions to be asked and answered through
research.
Stating the problem early and in a highly structured form may indeed lock the researcher into
a fixed stance with respect to the situation being observed, and it may also block the emergence
of new ideas that might be stimulated by new experience. But open-endedness may have costs
as well. For instance, Huber (1973) argues that letting the emergent features of each new
research situation continually exert pressure to redefine problems and hypotheses tends to
bias the emerging theory in the direction of the status quo.

It gives undue weight to the particular situation being studied at the moment, diverts attention
from the problems posed by other theories, and interferes with theory-testing because the
same data obviously cannot be used both to form and to test an hypothesis. In this view,
prestated problems and hypotheses do much more than make it “easier to program action” (as
Schatzman and Strauss [1973] suggest).
They discipline research in the interest of testing theory, accumulating knowledge, and achieving
a theoretical standpoint independent of the time and place in which researchers presently find
themselves.

Overcoming Methodological
Constraints on Problem Formulation
Both sides in the foregoing debate clearly have merit. However, in practice the decision as to
when and how research problems should be defined usually depends less upon the perceived
merits of one or the other of these procedures than upon the research style selected. Methods
differ in their abilities to predict the kinds, quantities, and quality of the data that may be
available in any given instance. For example, survey researchers or experimentalists can usually
say with more certainty than fieldworkers whether or not the data pertinent to a particular
research problem can be readily collected. Fieldwork offers the possibility of many data sources,
but it is usually hard to say in advance which data will actually be obtainable. Similarly,
Selltiz, Jahoda, Deutsch, and Cook (1959) note the need to take a “wait-and-see” attitude in the
use of nonreactive data sources such as statistical records: “The use of such data demands a
capacity to ask many different questions related to a research problem. . . . The guiding
principle for the use of available statistics consists in keeping oneself flexible with respect to
the form in which the research questions are asked”.

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