1. What is Research?

Just a few months ago, on this web page - at www.rebc.cc - I offered the definition that research is "...blokes and birds trying to make sense of stuff..." At the time that was a 'therapeutic definition', designed to counteract the pseudo-science of some elements withing the counselling and therapy community that seek certainty via positivist science.

However, the problem for our positivistic colleagues is that philosophy has for a very long time grappled with the problem of 'the search for certain knowledge'. Plato grappled with it, and lost. He concluded that we had to 'go inside (the soul)', and 'rise to a higher level' to be informed by the 'universal Forms'. Only the universal forms - the perfect form of beauty, the perfect form of justice, the perfect horse, the perfect human, and so on - were real. All the normal perceptions of normal (non philosophical) people were merely distorted impressions formed by imperfect perceptual apparatus.

In other words, the sceptics had won the war of words regarding the impossibility of "seeing perfectly" what is "there" to be "seen". Phenomena were created by the perceiver!

Hence "blokes and birds trying to make sense of stuff". However, the downside of my definition is this: Is any man or woman who is trying to make sense of stuff just as accurate, valid and reliable as any other? For example, if the person has had no formal education in a discipline, can they - by "muddling through" - compete with the interpretations and truth claims of a man or woman who has been educated in that particular discipline? Clearly not. The person on the number 47 bus, opining about the nature of politics, is not as justified in their view as the person who has spent ten years studying political philosophy and 'political science'.  And it seems to take at least 5,000 hours, and probably more than 10,000 hours, to reach professional competence in any major discipline.

That was the limitation of my 'debunking definition'. So now I want to present the 'other side' of a fuller definition. This one comes from John McLeod:

According to McLeod (1994: 4-5), there are six aspects to the definition of research:

“I. The concept of critical inquiry. Research grows out of the primary human tendency to need to learn, to know, to solve problems. These impulses are fundamentally critical; the need to know is the counterpoint to the sense that what is known is not quite right.

“2. Research as a process of inquiry. Any research involves a series of steps or stages. Knowledge must be constructed. There is a cyclical process of observation, reflection and experimentation.

“3. Research is systematic. … any investigation takes place within a theoretical system of concepts or constructs. … research involves the application of a set of methods or principles, the purpose of which is to achieve knowledge that is as valid and truthful as possible.

“4. The products of research are propositions or statements.

…

“5. Research findings are judged according to criteria of validity, truthfulness or authenticity. To make a claim that a statement is based on research is to imply that it is in some way more valid or accurate than a statement based on personal opinion.

…

“6. Research is communicated to interested others; it takes place within a research community. No single research study has much meaning in isolation. Research studies provide the individual pieces that fit together to create the complex mosaic of the literature of a topic”.

Source: Mcleod, John (1994/2003) Doing Counselling Research, London: Sage.

I will return to this subject later...

Sunday 10th May 2009