My work with a really bright junior at a top college that many CPE students would cut off their right arms to get into occasioned a recent epiphany:
The word research means two very different things through high school and in popular culture on the one hand and in higher education and scholarly discourse on the other. Same word, but two things that are more dissimilar than similar.
As early as grade school and as generally used outside of academia, research means to look into, find out, investigate, learn. I’m researching the Star Is Born movie times now. I just discovered Elvis Costello and I’m doing all kind of research on him. I’m researching Trump’s gross misuses of power. Students choose topics to research in this sense based on their interests, because that’s what they want to learn about. Well, good. Get busy.
In higher education and scholarly literature, research means, not learning new facts about things already known (just not known by us yet), but almost the exact opposite. It means asking a question that doesn’t have a conclusive answer yet and then trying to find one through an experiment or other valid research method. You can’t do scholarly research by reading stuff or talking to people who know. The classic standard for earning a Ph.D. is making an original contribution to knowledge. If a department chair gave a deadline to a junior faculty member or else kiss tenure goodbye, she wouldn’t necessarily think of a topic she’s interested in, but of an unanswered question she could ask and attempt to answer it.
What if we donated a million dollars to the Mayo Clinic to help find a cure for cancer and asked how they were using the funds and they said, ”Well research is already underway. And we’re excited because we have six books, three internet sources, and two clippings from old newspapers!”?
One of the significant consequences of the unfortunate linguistic conflation of these two different phenomena is that it derails lots of undergraduates who didn’t get the memo. (Honestly, for all my strings of A’s in college and grad school before Boston College, I didn’t get the memo until my Qualitative Research Methods class in my doctoral program, taught by the best professor at BC at the time, the beloved Dr. Polly Ulichny.)
I’m sure others have noticed, maybe even written about, this linguistic oddity/matter of interest, but what captures my interest are potential consequences for some (maybe lots) of college students.
I’m going to be very unscientific and offer one example, the one that got me thinking about this stuff, and suggest it’s not uncommon.
Abby is a hard-working mostly A student at Tufts (name and school have been changed to protects the innocent, but they’re not far off). She takes great pride in her academic accomplishments and is, of course, gunning for an A in her Research Methods class. Students learned about surveys and basic quantitative methods, interviews, observation, and participant observation. When it came time to the final project—asking a research question and designing a study to attempt to answer it—Abby, being a red-blooded 21-year-old but using, I think, a high school definition of research, came up with, What does love mean to current Tufts students? And choosing research methods as if ordering from a menu, she thought it would be neat to send out a questionnaire using SurveyMonkey, have a few interviews with friends of hers who were in relationships, and observing couples eating in a local restaurant. She asked one set of questions about love in the survey, a completely different set of questions about love during interviews (friends across the hall) who didn’t take the survey, and I don’t know what they hell she was observing at the next table in the restaurant or how that made her a “participant” observer. But in her bright, young mind, she was going to learn something about love and that meant what she was doing was research.
Oops.
If it weren’t for Dr. Ulichny’s adamant championing of qualitative research methods as every bit as scientific as the so-called “hard” quantitative sciences, I’d never have thought of this. The connection is that research methods must be appropriate and effective in answering the question, not just somehow tangentially related. Newton can’t research and eventually discover a law of gravity simply by watching apples fall or getting bonked on the head. Nor can you discover the law of love by asking a few questions or observing a few couples.
Happy Chanukah to one and all!