Method 89
post-modernist perspective? Are you undertaking to construct a ‘feminist reading’
of the incidences that you have witnessed? Will your analysis be coloured by a
‘liberal’ or a ‘conservative’ understanding of the political landscape? If you do take
a particular philosophical stance towards your study, my advice here is that you
explicitly state your views to the reader before you choose which ‘method’ you will
use to gather data. Justify why you decided to use such a perspective from among
the many competing viewpoints, and how that perspective informs your choice of
data collection methods or instruments. Later, of course, you will need to revisit this
view as you analyze your data and discuss your findings.
You have told your readers about your hypotheses or questions. Now you must
tell them what method or methods you used to test the hypotheses or answer the
questions, and why you chose them. You should first review the methods avail-
able to you, and then present reasons for selecting the methods you used. Students
often forget this step altogether when writing their theses. You may have used a
fairly standard method used by your predecessors for testing the type of hypothesis
you have put forward. You may have adopted a method suggested by colleagues
or supervisors as being suitable. In these cases you might not really be aware that
you had selected a method, but nonetheless a selection has taken place; one of the
less obvious aspects of the progress of research is that, not only does knowledge
advance, but so does method. There are continual refinements to the statistics that
are used to assess the outcomes of experiments, for example.
Alternatively, you might have put a lot of thought into the selection of your
method, but by the time you came to report the results, you were so immersed
in them that you completely overlooked the necessity to say why you chose that
particular method. But whatever the selection process, the reader cannot read your
mind. No examiner is going to be kind enough to write, ‘Well, even though it is all
very unclear, I am sure that the candidate had good reasons for selecting that par-
ticular method’—examiners are specifically asked to check whether the methods
you have adopted are appropriate, and whether you have justified your selection of
them. The issue here is really one of the need to justify your assumptions, which I
further examine later in this chapter.
It’s worth noting again that, in some disciplines, what I’ve loosely referred to
here as ‘the hypothesis’ may be a complex bundle consisting of an innovation, dis-
cussion of anticipated properties of the innovation, and explanation of criteria that
the innovation is intended to meet. ‘The method’ is the mechanism for evaluating
whether the innovation successfully meets these criteria. The examiner needs to be
persuaded of the rationale underlying all of these elements.
The term triangulation is used in research work when we use more than one
research method to answer our research questions or test our hypotheses. The term
is derived by analogy from surveying, where precise measurement of something
involves observing it from multiple angles or locations, and also ensuring that the
measurements are consistent with each other. We might do this if we had more
than one hypothesis or question, or if the question was multi-faceted and different
methods were needed to throw light on the different facets. This is quite common
in research in the social sciences. In other disciplines, triangulation might be used