What is Research

LAAR 64150 · Design Research

Part I

What is research

Part II

Asking the question

Part III

Methods and evidence

Part IV

Why theory matters

Part V

Paradigms and incommensurability

Part VI

Disciplines and trading zones

Part VII

Research is never neutral

Part VIII

Finding it, and making it public

What is Research

The pursuit of new knowledge through the process of discovery. Purdue University
Two grammars of the word: Open English Wordnet
- Noun — a search for knowledge. Verb — to find out systematically.
The systematic, intentional process of asking questions, gathering evidence, interpreting data, and generating knowledge. ChatGPT
All three agree on two things: knowledge that did not exist before, by a process someone else could follow.

How to do research?

What do you want to study? Be specific. You cannot just say you want to study pumpkins — what about pumpkins?
Why, and why now? What is at stake — climate, injustice, public health, democracy?
How will you study it? That is your method.
What is the outcome? A paper, a dataset, a model, an exhibition, a policy brief. Say which.

Part I

What is research

Part II

Asking the question

Part III

Methods and evidence

Part IV

Why theory matters

Part V

Paradigms and incommensurability

Part VI

Disciplines and trading zones

Part VII

Research is never neutral

Part VIII

Finding it, and making it public

From a topic to a question

A topic is a noun. A question is something evidence can answer.
Four dials: place, time, population, comparison. Most people turn only the first.
Pumpkins → pumpkin farming in the Northeast → how has it changed since agritourism became its main market?
Stop when you can picture the evidence. You can also over-narrow.

Ask a how question

Why asks for a cause you would have to isolate from all the others. What stops at description. How names a process — and a process has parts you can go look at.
Why did the neighborhood gentrify? → How did rezoning, lending and marketing work on each other?
Why is the river polluted? → How does permitting distribute discharge, and who is downstream of whom?
Keep the why. It is your significance section, not your question.

What each stem commits you to

Stem	You are promising	Its typical trap
What is…	A description or a map.	Stops at description and never argues.
How does…	A process or mechanism.	Too many moving parts; bound it.
Why does…	A cause.	Unanswerable at one project’s scale, unless your design can isolate.
Under what conditions…	A boundary on a known claim.	Needs real contrast cases, not examples.

Experimental work asks “what is the effect of” and answers it, because the design does the ruling-out.

Is it researchable?

Answerable with evidence · arguable · scoped · reachable in the time you have.
And it fills a gap — not yet asked, asked only somewhere else, or answered with evidence that has since changed. Do not manufacture one: “nobody has studied this” usually means you have not found them yet.
The clinical version is FINER: Feasible, Interesting, Novel, Ethical, Relevant. Find the weakest letter. It is usually F.
How it fails: too broad · already answered · evidence does not exist · smuggles the answer · two questions in a trench coat.

Part I

What is research

Part II

Asking the question

Part III

Methods and evidence

Part IV

Why theory matters

Part V

Paradigms and incommensurability

Part VI

Disciplines and trading zones

Part VII

Research is never neutral

Part VIII

Finding it, and making it public

What is a Method

Quantitative and qualitative are how scientists traditionally split it — numbers and statistical analysis, against words, images and meaning.
A starting point, not a cage. Also: historical, experimental, computational, theoretical, practice-based.
A method is simply how you study something. State it so specifically that someone else could repeat it.
Combine two carefully and you have a new one.

What counts as evidence

Every field has a settlement about what counts. It is a convention, not a law of nature.
Ask of any source: where did it come from (who made it, for whom, who paid)? What does it leave out? How far can it carry?
Say which standard you are working to, and why it fits your question.

Name your method with verbs

Verb + object + purpose: I will [do this] to [this material] in order to find out [that].
Compare county records across four decades to find when the market shifted. Interview twelve growers to understand how they decide what to plant.
If you cannot write that sentence, you have a topic and a hope, not a method.
Careful with “explore.” The work should sound exploratory, not like a fishing trip — and the fix is a specific method, not a more confident adjective.
Post-rationalization is allowed. It should also be fun.

Part I

What is research

Part II

Asking the question

Part III

Methods and evidence

Part IV

Why theory matters

Part V

Paradigms and incommensurability

Part VI

Disciplines and trading zones

Part VII

Research is never neutral

Part VIII

Finding it, and making it public

What theory is, and is not

A well-substantiated explanation that can incorporate laws, hypotheses and facts. AMNH · A system of ideas intended to explain something. Oxford
Theory bridges, mediates and reconciles thought and action. Beth Meyer
Not a guess — the academic sense is the opposite of “just a theory.” Not decoration — a name in your introduction that never touches your evidence is a citation, not a framework.
Not optional. Refusing theory gets you whatever assumptions your training installed, running unexamined.

The stack beneath your method

Ontology — what you think exists.
Epistemology — how you think it can be known.
Methodology — why your methods suit that.
Method — the thing you actually do on Tuesday.
Everyone has all four. Most people only choose the last, and inherit the rest from their training without noticing.

Four positions you will meet

	Reality is…	So knowledge comes from…
Positivism	Out there, single, independent of us.	Measurement and control; the researcher stays out of it.
Interpretivism	Made by people, plural, situated.	Understanding meaning from the inside; the researcher is part of the instrument.
Critical realism	Real, but reached only through our concepts.	Inferring the mechanisms under what we observe.
Critical theory	Real, and shaped by power.	Analysis that takes a side and says so.

Find your discipline. Then find the one next door. That gap is where the arguments live.

Four things you can do with a theory

Apply it to a case it has not met · test it where it makes a prediction · extend it · contest it.
Contesting is the highest-value move. You may contest a famous theory with a small case — that is how most got revised.
It goes wrong as decoration, as an alibi for gathering no evidence, when it is so strong that every case confirms it, and as framework shopping.
Name what your framework cannot see. That reads as command of the material.

Part I

What is research

Part II

Asking the question

Part III

Methods and evidence

Part IV

Why theory matters

Part V

Paradigms and incommensurability

Part VI

Disciplines and trading zones

Part VII

Research is never neutral

Part VIII

Finding it, and making it public

Science does not grow by accumulation. It grows by breaking and rebuilding.

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.

Normal science, anomaly, paradigm

Normal science is puzzle-solving inside an agreed framework — not an insult. It is where the precision comes from, and it is what you will be doing.
An anomaly is a result that will not go away. The response is not abandonment but patching — which is how research works. When the patches stop convincing people, that is crisis.
Kuhn’s 1969 postscript split paradigm in two: the disciplinary matrix a community shares, and the exemplars it drills students on.
You learn a paradigm by doing its problem sets — which is why it is so hard to state, and so hard to leave.

Incommensurability — no common measure

From geometry: a square’s diagonal and its side have no common unit. They are still comparable — you can say which is longer. There is just no shared ruler.
Rival paradigms are like that: no neutral standard both sides accept could simply decide it.
The disagreement is not only about answers. It is about what the question is, what counts as evidence, and what a good answer looks like.
Kuhn later narrowed it to the taxonomic kind — the shared words carve the world differently.

What it does not mean

Not incomparability, and not unintelligibility — you can learn the other paradigm, the way you learn a language. Kuhn learned Aristotle’s.
Not “anything goes.” He denied that reading for thirty years.
Kuhn-loss: the new paradigm does not explain everything the old one did. Revolutions are trades.
Choice stays rational on five shared values — accurate, consistent, broad, simple, fruitful — working as values, not rules: everyone accepts them and they still conflict.

Part I

What is research

Part II

Asking the question

Part III

Methods and evidence

Part IV

Why theory matters

Part V

Paradigms and incommensurability

Part VI

Disciplines and trading zones

Part VII

Research is never neutral

Part VIII

Finding it, and making it public

A discipline is not a subject. It is a settlement about what counts.

That is why the field next door can be rigorous and still disagree with you about everything.

What every field has already settled

What is the object? What counts as evidence? What is a finding? How much error is tolerable? Where does it go, and who judges it?
Three things travel everywhere: a question that could have gone another way, evidence someone else could check, an argument exposed to people qualified to attack it.
Peer review, committee, crit, court and replication are different rooms for the same function.

Different equipment, not different rigor

	Sciences & engineering	Social sciences	Humanities	Design & the arts
Move	Isolate, intervene, repeat; benchmark.	Sample and infer, or go deep on few cases.	Read closely, situate, argue.	Make it, in order to find out.
Evidence	Measurements with stated uncertainty.	Surveys, records, transcripts, fieldnotes.	The source itself.	The drawing, model, prototype, site.
A finding	An effect that survives replication.	An association or a mechanism.	A better reading than the received one.	A proposition made arguable.

You cannot randomize the French Revolution. Method follows object.

False friends

Model — an object, a statistical specification, a simulation, or a simplified theory.
Significant — passes a threshold, or matters. Bias — an error to correct, or a position to declare.
Critical — essential, or analyzing power. Theory, field and sample all split the same way.
When a meeting keeps snagging on one word, stop and define it. That word is doing all the damage.

Multi, inter, trans

	What happens	What integrates
Multidisciplinary	Several fields work the same problem in parallel.	Nothing. The findings sit next to each other.
Interdisciplinary	Methods and concepts combine into something neither field had.	The framework. Somebody’s method changed.
Transdisciplinary	Partners outside the academy join as knowledge partners.	The problem definition, set with them.

Most projects calling themselves interdisciplinary are multidisciplinary. The test: did anyone’s method actually change?

Why working across is hard

The disagreements are epistemological, and they arrive in self-reinforcing bundles — you cannot settle one in isolation.
Disciplinary capture: the side with the numbers or the money quietly sets the terms.
The institutions are built against it — separate journals, review standards, panels, tenure lines.
Unnamed, the disagreement resurfaces later as a personality problem.

Trading zones

Physicists and engineers from incompatible traditions did build radar together, without either side converting. Peter Galison
A trading zone is a local arrangement where two communities exchange around a shared object, each keeping its own reasons for caring about it.
A boundary object — a map, a dataset, a prototype — is sturdy enough to be shared and loose enough that each side reads its own meaning into it.
The language grows there: jargon, then a working pidgin. Aim for interactional expertise — enough to ask a real question, not enough to do their job.
Do not start by agreeing on epistemology. Build the shared object.

Part I

What is research

Part II

Asking the question

Part III

Methods and evidence

Part IV

Why theory matters

Part V

Paradigms and incommensurability

Part VI

Disciplines and trading zones

Part VII

Research is never neutral

Part VIII

Finding it, and making it public

Who is asking, and from where

Nobody arrives at a question from nowhere. Training, language, funding and access all shaped it first.
Not a defect to apologize for. A condition to state, so the reader can weigh your account.
What can I see from here that an outsider cannot, and what is invisible from here? Who benefits if my answer is the one believed?
A paragraph, not a confession.

What got counted, and what did not

Data is not found lying around. Someone chose to collect it, chose the categories, and paid for it — and those decisions travel with it forever.
An archive holds what an institution thought worth keeping, about the people it thought worth tracking.
Absence is evidence too. A population missing from the record is a finding about the record.
Read against the grain: ask what the document was made for.

Every dataset is a record of what someone decided was worth measuring.

Including yours.

Rigor is not neutrality

“All research is situated” raises the standard rather than lowering it.
Rigor is what lets someone else check you: say what you did, show the evidence that cut against you, state the limits before a reviewer does.
Confidence comes from having tried to break your own argument.
So: what would convince you that you are wrong? If nothing would, it is not research yet.

Part I

What is research

Part II

Asking the question

Part III

Methods and evidence

Part IV

Why theory matters

Part V

Paradigms and incommensurability

Part VI

Disciplines and trading zones

Part VII

Research is never neutral

Part VIII

Finding it, and making it public

Where to find information

Public data — data.gov, the census, BLS, CDC, USGS, NOAA, the World Bank. Go local for resolution: most cities run a portal.
Archives — National Archives, Library of Congress, Chronicling America, HathiTrust, David Rumsey for maps.
Scholarship and other — Scholar, JSTOR, Project MUSE, patents, standards and codes. And people, who hold what was never written down.
Download the codebook with the data. Email the archivist — one reply beats a week of clicking. Full link list on the course page.

How to actually search

Find one good source, then work the citation graph backwards (its bibliography) and forwards (“cited by”). The recurring names are your field.
Find a review article before you read twenty papers. Somebody has already mapped it.
Vary your vocabulary — each word opens a different literature.
Talk to the subject librarian. It is their job and almost nobody asks. Keep a citation manager from day one.

Making it public

Research that reaches nobody changes nothing. Say who the answer is for, and how it gets to them.
Your reader is in the field next door, not in your subfield — a knowledgeable non-expert. Every false friend from Part VI is waiting in your first paragraph.
The clearest version wins. If a reader has to re-read a sentence you have lost them, and they will not tell you why.
One clear diagram does the work of a paragraph.
For the proposal itself: Grant Writing 101.

Before next week

Your project in one sentence: I will [verb] [material] to find out [what], because [who cares]. Make it a how.
Name the one dataset or archive it depends on, and confirm you can get it.
Name the framework you are already using, and what it cannot see.
Find two false friends between your field and the one closest to your project.