Page 19 - DLIS401_METHODOLOGY_OF_RESEARCH_AND_STATISTICAL_TECHNIQUES

Methodology of Research and Statistical Techniques

Notes The Empirical Unfolding of Research Problems

Once a study is published, it is in many ways irrelevant whether the research problem prompted
the study or instead emerged from it. With publication, the study’s problem enters the public
domain and becomes the responsibility not only of the study’s author but of all who are
professionally interested in that research area. At that point, the key issue is what to do with
the problem next. Research into a problem does not end with a single study. Nor is there truly
a final formulation of a problem any more than there is a final solution. All research involves
some simplification of the problem being investigated. This is unavoidable given the limitations
on our resources, theories, and methods.
However, each of a discipline’s separate new studies, or each phase of study in an individual’s
research program, reveals new aspects of the problem by addressing issues that earlier research
could not address. The two modes of formulating research problems that we have just discussed
differ in that one looks to past studies, while the other looks to ongoing work. But the two are
similar in that both rely upon empirical inquiry rather than upon nonempirical procedures,
such as speculation or the purely logical analysis of ideas. This means that whether research
problems emerge from current research or instead derive from earlier work, research methods
are directly implicated in the process. Every empirically based research problem has a methodological
as well as a substantive component, and this methodological component may equally influence
our perceptions as to which particular phenomena and theories are problematic. One of the
central questions to be posed, therefore, is how do the methods employed in research directly
affect the formulation of research problems?

The Substantive Importance of Methodology
Deutscher (1966), for example, posed this question of methodological influence by revealing
one of the major simplifications of social policy research conducted through the early 1960s.
He noted the very heavy reliance upon survey research at that time, and suggested that this
reliance upon surveys led social scientists to oversimplify research problems by assuming that
verbal responses reflect behavioral tendencies.

Deutscher observed that only by making this assumption were researchers, who were studying
issues such as racial and ethnic discrimination, able to make causal inferences about behavior
solely on the basis of questionnaire and interview data. However, he stressed that this assumption
neglected a central problem that had begun to emerge from exploratory field studies as early
as the 1930s: People’s words and deeds frequently do not agree. To correct this oversimplification,
Deutscher urged both that this neglected problem of “attitude versus action” must be formulated
more systematically and that a new research technology, a multimethod approach, must be
developed to capture both attitudinal and behavioral aspects of policy problems.

The problem of attitude versus action is now a major topic of multimethod research. But when
Deutscher addressed this problem in 1966, the topic was relatively unexplored. New areas of
inquiry, where little is presumably yet known, promise productive research problems. However,
the actual formulation of the problems may be more difficult than in more developed areas
in which consistent bodies of empirical generalizations and theories have already been established.
This became evident when Deutscher (1966) set about formulating the problem of attitude
versus action:
"We still do not know much about the relationship between what people say and
what they do—attitudes and behavior, sentiments and acts, verbalizations and
interactions, words and deeds. We know so little that we can’t even find an adequate
vocabulary to make the distinction! Under what conditions do they say one thing
and behave exactly the opposite? In spite of the fact that all of these combinations
have been observed and reported few efforts have been made to order these observations."

14 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY