Research Design and Disciplinary Differences
Knowledge differs so research differs
Research differs from discipline to discipline as do the methodologies that we use to uncover new information or create a better understanding of a research topic or problem. Bernstein (2000) tells us that the structure of a particular kind of knowledge determines, to a greater or lesser extent, the structure of a discipline. So, while all academic knowledge construction aspires to validity, rigour and trustworthiness, the ways in which it achieves this can be markedly different.
Hypothesis testing and scientific objectivity, for example, are crucial tenets of many of the Natural Sciences but may be considered problematic in some Social Sciences where undefined problems are valued and subjective positionality is acknowledged.
Some of you might be working in disciplines with strong research cultures, others might be working in ‘regions’ with weaker research cultures. Regions are made from multiple disciplines and face towards the world of work. The distinction between singular disciplines and regions also has significant implications for research design (Muller 2009).
For this reason, it is not possible within the scope of this course on supervision to engage with issues of research design to any great extent. Expertise in research design within one’s discipline, and increasingly in an interdisciplinary – or transdisciplinary – way, is essential to good supervision. We need to keep up-to-date with shifts in our field and to engage with our scholarly community around issues of methodology. Being narrowly confined to supervising on the exact issue and using the exact approach we used in our own studies is extremely problematic. There are several publications (e.g., Creswell 2014; Kumar 2014; Newman et al 2016; Tobi 2018), conferences and short courses dedicated to the issue of research design and methodology and we owe it to our students to seek these out and to constantly develop our expertise in these areas.