Composition
of research report
Normally, a
research report consists of 12 parts: title, acknowledgement, table of
contents, abstract, introduction, literature review, research methods, results,
discussion, conclusion, appendices and references. All of them are familiar to
me but from today’s reading I have found simple but crucial information – we shouldn’t
include all the results we get. To make our research more succinct and to the
point we should preset and discuss only those findings that relate to our
research question(s).
Allegory of parable of cave
Lee Gunderson,
my professor teaching research methodology in education, started his lesson
with ‘parable of cave’ of Plato. I had heard but didn’t know what it exactly
signifies. It was taken from the 7th volume of Plato’s ‘The Republic’.
It talks about the reality and how it is perceived by people. The reality is
illusive and we can never know it because we have being changed with some constraints.
Perhaps this video will make the things clear
Reality and
knowledge
The professor
tries to direct the class to the understanding of metaphysics, epistemology and
logical positivism. Metaphysics is the study of the fundamental nature of all
reality and epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge. I couldn’t say
right now the difference between the knowledge and the reality, however, just a
plausible guess of my mind. Reality is a relative concept. What is real today
may not be so tomorrow and it depends on the perspectives we use to see the
things. Something that we take for granted as real, may be wrong for someone
who has a different or better perspective to see it. Like in the allegory of
cave the prisoner have taken for granted that the world is the shadow moving on
the wall in front of them but for the one who went outside he found another
reality and that was something more convincing.
The word
knowledge, in my understanding has related but a bit different semantics. It is
something that we know or understand. Even though the reality is the same, the understanding
we make over it may differ from person to person. So knowledge is related to
epistemology and reality is with metaphysics, nonetheless both of them are the
branches of philosophy.
Logical
positivism
Auguste Comte
was the first philosopher to propound the concept of positivism. He claimed
that theory must be based on observed facts. Several branches of research
developed after the induction of positivism or logical positivism. The studies
on plants and animals started to be called naturalistic research. Similarly
lepidopterists (for the people involved in Insect that in the adult state has
four wings more or less covered with tiny scales), botanists, and
biologists emerged as researchers. Some of them studied the physical world and
their field were geography or astronomy. The areas of research involved in the
study of human beings were known as ethnography, anthropology, and epidemiology.
Anthropological
researches sometimes have been the subject of ethical discussion. For example
the study in Ishi – the only found living man from Yahi tribe. The following
video will give more information on Ishi and his life after he was found.
Case studies,
patient interviews, experiment and quasi-experiment, survey, conceptual
analysis (the analysis of the concepts found in literature), action research, historical
research (though some people say it is not a research as it lack facts...the
facts of histories are just the interpretations of historians), feminist
research are some of the examples of research methods/designs.
The best
statistics teachers: Prof. Gunderson
I found the
way Prof. Gunderson teaches is so fascinating, to the point and simply the
best. He has been the first teacher to provide the basic concept of statistics
to me. I have been trying to learn some of the fundamental concepts of research
statistics, basically after starting to do my MPhil thesis from Kathmandu University.
I have read few books and few pages on the web and have also used SPSS package
as a tool for analysing the quantitative data of my research. I still don’t
have confidence on the statistical operations that I carried out two years ago.
As a matter
of fact, Gunderson became the first guru today to make me clear the basic
concept of ‘statistical significance’. He made me a reporter of Vancouver Sun
and asked to write a report on a woman who can guess rightly whether tea or
milk was put on the tea. I went to the women and asked her to make her guess on
1st cup – she got right. The chance was ½ , again I asked to go for
another cup and she made it right the chance or probability became ¼ that means
there is 25% chance that she made it correct by accident. He asked, “Kapil, now
are you going to write the report?” I said “no” because I couldn’t take that
risk. It could be only chance. Let me give a next trial – the third one. Wow! With
my utter surprise the women guessed that rightly. I went on asking her to make
guesses and she got all right and I came to a certain point that I had less
than 5% chance that her right guess was just an accident. As a social science
researcher I decided to take that risk. Now I know that that as the statistical
significance at 5%level which is acceptable. In another words I am 95% sure
that the guessing expertise of the woman was 95% sure and decided to report to
the Vancouver Sun. In the field of medical science the significance level is
generally taken at 1% level because the risk factor may bring devastating
consequence if that comes to be true. This applies to the normal distribution
data.
He also gave
the basic concept behind mean and variance. Mean is average value and the
number that we get by subtracting the mean from the data is residual error
whose summation has to come to zero. In statistics minus (-) numbers are often
not kept so to eliminate them the residual errors are squared and the summation
of squared numbers when divided by the number of items (N) taken into
consideration gives the Variance or standard deviation. Hat off Prof.
Gunderson, you made the things clear for me.
