Vignettes
Below are a few hypothetical scenarios about students who are doing research projects. They serve to illustrate some of the common problems you may come up against when conducting your own research. As a brainstorming exercise, read through these stories and discuss them with your classmates in small groups: try to work out what the student has done wrong in each case, and how they might salvage their research project. If you are experiencing difficulties with your own research that are similar to any of these, you may find it helpful to take a copy of the relevant vignette to discuss with your supervisor.
1. Lack of focus
Mabel wants to do her undergraduate Sociology project on race and ethnicity in the police force. She has a passionate interest in this topic and can't wait to get started. However, when she goes to see her supervisor, Dr Khan, he suggests that she needs to narrow down her focus and decide more specifically what she wants to find out. He wants her to come back when she has thought more about her research design, aims and objectives. Mabel goes away feeling deflated. How can she improve her research plans?
2. Too much to read
Andrew is just beginning a literature review for his project on professional gardeners in stately homes. He thought that this was a fairly esoteric subject and that he would be able to skim through what little literature there was within a couple of days. However, when he gets to the library and types a few words - 'gardening', 'social class' and 'home' - into an Internet search engine, it comes up with 200,000 hits. Andrew doesn't know where to start, so he abandons the computer and begins walking around the library shelves, pulling books off at random and flipping through them. Everything he picks up seems to be related in some way to his topic, and he begins to panic that he will have to read all of these books. What can Andrew do to search the literature more efficiently?
3. Supervisor problems
Hattie is worried that her supervisor doesn't understand her or her project. She wants to do a case study analysis of a nineteenth century nursemaid, based on some old documents and letters that she found in her grandmother's attic. Her supervisor, Professor Ordinal, thinks that this is not 'proper' research because it relies on an unscientific research design and does not involve rigorous statistical analysis. He has little patience with Hattie, and keeps cancelling his appointments with her, thinking that he has more important things to do. Meanwhile, Hattie knows that time is passing and her deadline is only six months away. What can she do to resolve this conflict of interests?
4. Methodological dilemma
Dominic has been working hard on his study of gay men's experiences of stigma and discrimination in higher education. He realized that this could be a very sensitive issue for people to discuss face-to-face, so he designed a self-completion questionnaire that he handed out at gay clubs, in the Students' Union and at his local community health centre. However, he has only had 20 replies from the 300 questionnaires he sent out, and he knows that this will make it difficult to generalize his findings. He remembers that he asked his respondents to provide some identifying information about themselves (age, degree scheme, university town, etc) and thinks this might have made them wary about sending the questionnaire back. With seven months left to go on the project, should Dominic redesign his survey and try again, or abandon it in favour of a different method, such as in-depth interviewing?
5. Negotiating access / ethics and responsibility
Candice wants to do her project on the working conditionsof employees at a factory that manufactures chocolate and confectionery. She has a hunch that these people are being exploited by low pay, long hours and a failure to implement health and safety regulations. She wrote to the managing director of the company to ask whether she could interview some of his employees about these matters, but received no answer. She then tried to phone his secretary, but was told that he was 'in a meeting' all day. A similar response greeted her when she tried to contact the deputy directors and senior managers in the company, all of whom seemed very reluctant to talk to her. Candice's aunt, who works at the factory, suggests that she could help Candice to get a job there in order to observe 'under cover'. Candice knows this can be a dangerous and ethically dubious method to use, but thinks it may be the only way of getting her data. What should she do?
6. Ethics in cyberspace
Howie spends a lot of time talking to people in Internet chat rooms and forums about magic, religion and the supernatural. He began his research into contemporary forms of Wicca because of a personal interest in this belief system, and has set up his own website about it, with a discussion board and collective online journal. Plenty of young people have found the site and regularly post there, pouring out their life stories and comparing their religious experiences. The trouble is, Howie now feels way out of his depth. The average age of the mailers seems to be 15, and he is worried that this might mean that the informed consent they gave is not ethically - or legally - acceptable. Furthermore, these young people are disclosing a lot of very personal, sensitive information: they keep telling him how pleased they are to have found a 'safe' place online where they can share their experiences, but Howie worries that they may come to regret what they have said later on. He certainly didn't expect the discussions to get this intense, and with his project deadline looming, he knows he will have to close down the website soon. What can Howie do to protect his participants and to make 'leaving the field' less of a blow to them?
7. Writer's block
Emily is starting to panic. Her dissertation is due in six weeks' time, and she hasn't even begun to write it. The research went well: she conducted eighteen in-depth interviews with care assistants in a residential home for children with learning difficulties, and gathered a lot of interesting data. She also managed to analyze the data using NVivo, and created a coding tree to map out the relations between the key themes: alternative models of the family, beliefs about 'normal' childhood experiences, and emotion work. Emily spent six months living and working full time in the home as an overt participant observer, and so found she had no time to prepare drafts of her written work or even to keep a research diary. She can't remember how exactly she negotiated access or devised her sample of interviewees, and in retrospect the whole research process seems a bit 'messy' - how is she ever going to write a coherent Methods chapter? She read widely before going into the field, but hasn't had time to organize her notes for the Literature Review. Now her supervisor is asking to see a draft of her research report, and she doesn't know where to start. Every time she sits down to write, she just stares at her blank computer screen and feels sick. She tries to write first one section, then another, but gets confused about how all the sections fit together and where her data ought to go. What can Emily do to break through this wall of panic and get on with her writing?
