Defining “Methodology”

Recall the definition we worked out earlier: Academic disciplines are ways of organizing learning and producing new knowledge by asking questions and using approaches to answering them that are appropriate to the subject, issue, problem, or phenomenon being studied. Now zoom in on the second half: These disciplines don’t just ask certain questions, they adopt certain approaches to answer them. Biology, for example, uses a specific approach (or really a set of them) to answer the question of how organic life functions and develops, and this is distinctly different from the way psychology approaches the problem of understanding the human mind and human behavior, or the way philosophy approaches the issues of metaphysics and epistemology (the study of the nature and limits of human knowledge). The different questions and focuses of each discipline demand different approaches.

What we’ve been calling an “approach” up to this point is more properly termed a research methodology. A methodology is simply a system of methods that an academic discipline uses to carry out its research and pursue the answers to its questions, combined with an overarching philosophical attitude and interpretive framework for applying those methods. Biology uses the scientific method to conduct experimental and observational research in a laboratory or in the field. Psychology uses laboratory research, too, but as a “soft” science (a social science) instead of a “hard” science (a natural/physical science), it doesn’t conduct research in the same way that biology does, relying instead on such methods as case studies, surveys, and naturalistic observation (observing people in “real-life” contexts). Even when psychologists perform research in a laboratory, their methods differ from those of biologists because of the different focus. Philosophy, for its part, uses a methodology that combines intensive textual research, including the reading of past and present work by other philosophers, with certain principles of thought and interpretation sometimes called “knowledge paradigms” to make sense of reality, morality, art, and human life.

Here are some academic disciplines and some of their typical research methods:

Disciplines and methods

Field		Research Methods
Science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics)		Scientific method, laboratory research, field observation
Business		Case studies, focus groups, market research
Humanities (English Literature, History, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Religion)		Textual analysis, archival research, use of different literary interpretive theories
Social Sciences (Education, Psychology, Sociology, Linguistics)		Case studies, surveys, naturalistic observation, laboratory research

It’s also important to know that basic distinctions exist among research methods, which can be divided into different categories.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research Methods

One of the most crucial distinctions is between quantitative and qualitative methods. The boundary between these two approaches traces the boundary between inductive and deductive approaches to a given problem.

These people are counting albatross nests. Counting things is an example of quantitative research.

Quantitative research does what the name implies: It quantifies a problem by transforming it into numbers. It then “crunches” these numbers using various statistical and mathematical operations (often using statistical analysis software) to elicit the desired knowledge about the research problem. Various tools are used to quantify data, such as a survey containing questions with Likert scale responses (responses with numbered scales) to study people’s attitudes about something, or a thermometer to provide temperature data in an atmospheric science research project. Results are often presented using numbers, charts, and graphs.

Quantitative research generally uses a deductive approach. That is, it aims at testing a theory or hypothesis that is stated ahead of time. The steps in qualitative research are thus as follows:

1. Start with an existing theory relevant to your problem.
2. Develop a hypothesis from the theory.
3. Gather data to test the hypothesis.
4. Analyze the data to determine whether or not they support the hypothesis.

Examples of quantitative research could include:

• Researching the percentage amounts of toxins found in common sources of drinking water.
• Sending out surveys to determine how many hours per week college students spend on social media.

By contrast, qualitative research focuses on discovering reasons, motivations, attitudes, insights, and other non-quantitative data. One common way of gaining qualitative data in studies involving human issues and subjects is to conduct interviews or surveys and then pore through the resulting data to discover recurrent themes and meanings, to which the researcher assigns codes for use in describing and interpreting the study’s results. Like quantitative research, qualitative research may use tables, charts, and so on, but its most common currency is words. This is why qualitative research reports are often longer (in terms of pages) than quantitative ones.

Qualitative research generally uses an inductive approach: Rather than gathering data to test a hypothesis or theory that’s specified beforehand, it gathers data in search of a theory. It attempts to develop a theory that will cohesively account for all of the themes that emerge from the research. The theory comes not at the beginning, as it does in quantitative research, but at the end. The steps in qualitative research are as follows:

1. Gather data relevant to your problem.
2. Analyze and interpret the data.
3. Develop a theory to account for your findings.

Examples of qualitative research could include:

• Conducting interviews with first-year college students to research their attitudes toward first-year “college success” courses.
• Researching the history of different cultural attitudes toward the relationship between religion and science.

Experimental vs. Analytical Research Methods

Another major distinction is between experimental and analytical research. In the first, the researcher creates an experimental design to research a topic and answer the research question in search of new knowledge. The researcher then conducts the experiment and records and interprets the data. This type of research may be quantitative or qualitative, but its purpose is always to generate new findings. An agronomist researching new ways to increase crop productivity is engaged in experimental research. So is a business scholar researching the impact of new government legislation on stock market activity. So is an art therapist researching the effectiveness of a new protocol for using art to effect emotional healing in trauma victims.

Analytical research, by contrast, starts out with information and knowledge that already exists, and it gathers, analyzes, and evaluates this information in order to make some kind of judgment or determination about it. From this description, you may already be able to see that analytical research is a type of qualitative research. A film scholar drawing previously unrecognized connections between the works of three filmmakers from different times, places, and cultures is engaged in analytical research. So is a philosopher coming up with a new model of ethical behavior. So is a college student who creates a research paper by defining a topic, thoroughly researching it, and then writing the paper to assemble, evaluate, and draw a conclusion or make an argument about the findings.

Relating Questions to Research Methods

Finally, notice that the choice of a research method, including the choice of a quantitative or qualitative approach and an experimental or analytical one, is usually linked to the nature of the research question itself. An economist, for example, might research answers to the question, “How can we measure the impacts of globalization on developing countries?” Such a question might take either a quantitative or a qualitative approach, depending on what the researcher intends to measure. (Does the word refer to numerical impacts like health data and relative amounts of goods, services, or money? Or does it refer to qualitative phenomena such as people’s attitudes and subjective experiences?) But it would almost certainly take an experimental approach because it asks for knowledge that does not currently exist.

An economist might also research the question, “What role should government policy play in the economy?” Notice how there’s no readily apparent way in which an experimental approach would apply. After all, how could an experiment answer a question that intrinsically involves value judgments and philosophical principles? Such a research project would almost certainly require an analytical approach, which means its research methodology would also automatically be qualitative.