Tutorial 3 Topics and Problems

0:00 hello everyone now in the previous two tutorials we talked about research philosophy and different paradigmatic positions in research now these form a very important basis for us before we we get to the action of doing research and because if you remember from tutorial one um everything in research is actually about getting to know something and uh and thinking about these philosophies in terms they how they guide us in terms of knowing things that is why they're important for us now these things we want to know about in research these are our topics and that is what today's tutorial is about um research topics and problems now a research topic plays a very

0:46 important role in a research project because that is like a short description of the social phenomenon under under investigation and also the context in which the study is done and it also forms the basis for what will become our formal research problem now in the tutorial i would like to talk a little bit about where we get our topics our research topics from then cover some popular topics and concepts or phenomena phenomena in organizational communication specifically and then proceed to talk about the links between our topics and other areas or aspects of our research and getting from the topic to a more expanded formalized research problem

1:35 now at the beginning of a research project the topic is one of the first things that give us direction about a research project about where we're going and what we are busy with um now and and later when a topic is given in written form um it is it becomes a sentence long summary of what your project is about like the the bare bones of it and also we use this topic um idea to to transform that into the the title the formal title or for instance a postgraduate um study the dissertation or thesis title will will be a transformation of this topic now um if i have to think about research topics there are two things i think that are

2:21 most important the one is the idea that you are busy with like the the creative uh idea the need the novelty that you see specifically for your project and then the other important part is your discipline and the different fields and concepts and things that are part of your specific discipline if you are in a position where you are choosing your own topic so so your project is not part of a much bigger research project that you are doing with other researchers in a way that the topic is kind of given to you by a supervisor or by a project leader or whatever if you are in control of your own topic it's very important that you ensure that your topic is inside of your your academic discipline

3:07 now a lot of studies are intentionally multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary this can also um this can also be the case for you and if this is the case you must make sure that you where your social phenomena is in which what what way your social phenomenon is rooted in different disciplines and subfields of those disciplines and how those fields intermingle to form like kind of the disciplinary basis for your study now in organizational communication of course it's also important that your topic is within an organizational setting so in a specific organization or about a specific industry or a specific type of organization but there must be an organizational setting that's part of

3:53 your thinking about your topic um now just to get back to all interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary type of work um it's also possible it and it happens a lot that the researchers scholars move away from the original discipline into another or a new discipline maybe or they change their research focus to interdisciplinary work or whatever during their careers but if you are a student postgrad student for instance it's important that you stick to your discipline for various reasons one is that this is the discipline that you are being educated in um so if you're doing an honest paper for instance you are required to stick within your discipline if you're a

4:39 master's degree student you have to show mastery of your discipline if you're a doctoral student you are required to make an academic contribution to your discipline so thinking about those links and making sure that your study is closely linked to your academic discipline is an important topic consideration for organizational communication we have such a a wide reaching disciplinary area that there's so many topics and concepts so many different fields of specialization that you could be focusing on that those can become a very good starting point for you when you think about your discipline and possible topics within your discipline i would like you to follow along on the screen for this um you you will see here like a little a

5:25 flowchart summary of the fields of organizational communication or what i regard as the most um the most well-known types of fields that this discipline is divided into firstly there's business communication or then marketing communication management communication corporate communication organizational communication sometimes used as the overarching term in our case we use it as the overarching term but it can also indicate a specific subfield in the discipline and then public relations then in finer detail to to that type of field um unpacking of the discipline um i want to show you some of the popular

6:12 concepts and topics that we we find in in our discipline you'll see many of them these have links to the to the fields and you will certainly make the link between field and uh and theme or concept when you write out your your research topic or formulate your research problem from your topic but um this just gives you a little bit more a detailed idea of certain things that are that are covered in our discipline now firstly there's um the communicative aspects of people working together or it's called workplace communication let's call it that um then there's organizational life and these are the communicative aspects of how people

6:57 experience life um in organizations or as part of organizations then there are um a theme about organizational networks that are topics that that spans like things like the patterns of connection and flow of communication in organizational contexts then communication relationships these are human relationships and how they are communicatively constructed in organizational contexts then organizational culture and climate these are very popular um topics in in organizational communication research um it's we can say it's the communicative nature of organizational culture like the shared values and beliefs and organizational climate which is in

7:44 short the feeling or the atmosphere in an organization and they communicate with management and leadership so also very popular topics they are the communication aspects of of the management ideas of leadership and management practice then next up is organizational change and uncertainty so these um this theme is includes topics that are about uh organizational change organizational uncertainty or innovation or disruption type topics and also crisis communication which is very popular at the moment because a lot of people are doing research on the covet lockdown and how organizations responded to that as a

8:30 crisis are in organizational settings then there's communication technology also very relevant in this day and age it's about its research on technological developments impacting organizational communication and information and communication technology use in organizations then there's this kind of collective theme that we can put together in some words i have here attitude behaviors emotions and values these are like maybe aspects of humanness communicative aspects of being a human and human stuff in organizational settings then a theme on communicating difference and diversity so it's about differences

9:16 between different human beings and communication aspects of organizational diversity very relevant in south african contexts for instance then there's the theme of image identity and identification so it's the communicative aspects of identity construction and image in organizational settings so that can cl include organizational identity and image like corporate identity corporate image that type of thing but also individual and group identities and identity formation like racial identities and topics of racism gender sexuality religion culture and so on so all them can be grouped into this idea of identity and image in in organizational settings

10:01 then issues of power and control so that these are conceptions of control and relationships between power and control in organizational settings and power relations um in teams and groups and management and staff that those type of topics form part of this theme of power and control then knowledge management and organizational learning this is basically about the communicative aspects of knowledge management and organizational learning and varying various intersections between knowledge and learning and communication then there's communication forms and styles and channels or media used for communication so it's about the different forms and styles and media channels of

10:48 communication in the context of organizations that's very simple and then in the last place i have here organizational communication at or in different levels and places and directions so in organizational settings as you can imagine there's a lot of different or it's linked to communication networks in many ways but there's many ways many levels at which communication can be studied and at which communication happens and many directions in which it flows and many places that it occurs and so on so this kind of last theme we can see that as maybe a grouping of topics that are all about levels of communication analysis like micro miso and macro type of thinking the direction

11:34 of communication like internal external horizontal vertical circular top down bottoms up that type of topics and then also maybe topics of on feedback and dialogue next up is the specific idea that you want to focus on the idea part is the more open and creative side of the research topic and in this sense research topics can come from almost anywhere we can for instance get topics from our personal experiences let's say you are a member of the lgbtq plus community and you've experienced discrimination so you might want to focus on the communicative experiences of lgbtq plus people in some organizational setting

12:20 if we take some organizational communication concepts that we talked about earlier this personal experience can be studied as part of maybe workplace communication of organizational life maybe or in terms of values attitudes and behaviors in organizational contexts or maybe in terms of power and control and there are many other possibilities but the idea of focusing on specific human things that comes from your own experiences can be worked into your your discipline in various ways to to form your research topic we can also be interested in a certain topic for research because we are interested in that topic in our personal lives or in our personal capacity

13:06 maybe you love music and you might study a music related topic in your area or you're a sports fan and maybe you choose a topic around that there are various ways to combine your field of study and your personal interests when it comes to research topics maybe you'll choose the music or sports industry as your setting for as a specific organizational setting for your study or you will study sport or music as part of a communications issue in organizational settings maybe you can weave your interest in this way maybe study the role of music in marketing communications or study whether participating in a sport as part of staff wellness programs can

13:52 contribute to dealing with workplace conflict for instance so can you see there are many ways of weaving these two together we can also get to a topic by looking at those around us our social context our families our own workplaces our churches our cultures our traditions and stuff maybe there's like a common experience or a specific need from your immediate social environment that can lead you to a topic say you know that young people of your culture struggle to find work because they often have a struggle with english being the business language this could be like the impetus of a research project or research topic at least if you employed you might even come across real life problems in your field

14:40 that can become a topic for your research for example maybe uh you have to lead the implementation of a new policy like maybe the poppy act here in south africa um in your company and how you deal with communication with customers or suppliers in terms of this new legislation this can inspire a research topic it could also be a wider societal need that prompts you to be interested in a certain idea maybe poverty the lack of access to government services in our country maybe those type of things wake you up to certain topics because you want to contribute to find a solution to this problem that we have in our society you could turn such a societal need into

15:25 a topic um maybe by studying the relationship between specific government department and the specific community with service delivery problems to to maybe see if there is not a communications type of way to think about this problem topics can also present themselves in the media through social media trends or like big stories in the news maybe covert as maybe the boring example of the moment but many new research projects are covert related but you can um study so many ideas of organizational communication and how things happened or how things changed or how things are post locked down and so on or maybe something happens like there's a big corporate blunder like um in the past

16:10 week um there was the clicks advertisement i think it was 2019 that created uproar because um it seemed racist to many people because it was about like black people's hair being somehow inferior um and then there's a lot of news stories about wearing izzy panda at work um so the click story can maybe inspire a project about racism in marketing and easy panda at work and it can be the beginning of a topic about organizational cultures or organizational life or something like that many research also researchers also find topics while they are reading academic literature we are all um it's busy at some point with reading scholarly work um other research projects um journal articles other people's studies so on

16:57 and the author many times the authors will mention a certain topic um that is recommended for future research most postgraduate dissertations and theses and many um journal articles end up saying something like what is that what could be of research interest in the future when they conclude their their writing now getting to a research topic is one thing but getting from a topic to a research problem is another if you can remember in tutorial one where we spoke about the three worlds framework where world one is the world of our everyday lives uh world two is the world of science and scientific research and world three is the world of

17:43 meter science now taking a topic to a problem uh is is like this process but in research form taking something from world one and making it suitable for world too so taking a social phenomenon from our everyday lives or a research idea from our everyday lives and transforming that into a more rigorous systematic formalized problem that is suitable for scientific research now you've already started this process by thinking in about your topic in terms of your academic discipline but before you can get to a place where you can write out your purpose statement or formulate your research questions you have to pay more detailed attention to

18:30 the conceptual stuff behind your research problem part of the systematic of research is about conceptual coherence now consensual coherence is is that golden threat that aligns a problem with your philosophical paradigm your theory your methodology and so on there are different levels of theory and different theoretical traditions and those should be considered when you conceptualize a research problem similarly there are different research positions as as you know by now that determine which research topics are worthwhile studying since the topic is embedded in your philosophical position for instance these will this will influence all aspects of the of the research process

19:16 so let's go back to the previous tutorial just to elaborate on this a little bit when we talked about the um different paradigmatic positions they are um um then we also covered uh what each position regards as possible and good reasons for doing research and it's from those reasons that we can deduce fit between topic and paradigmatic position also so positivists they do research to predict control manipulate phenomena and environments by studying causal relationships between variables measuring variables to describe them accurately and focusing on research of which the findings can become generalized rules or laws about a

20:03 specific topical phenomenon now interpretivists on the other hand do research to get an understanding of a phenomenon search for meaning in human and social aspects they do this by focusing on things like perceptions experiences emotions and values of people um and by in-depth analysis to get it that deep understanding of something and end up being able to describe it in detail transformative or critical research is always set on empowering and emancipating people from some kind of oppress oppression bringing about social change so so research is always about certain topics and often designed to

20:48 include participants in in many phases of the process critical realism now a lot of um there's a lot of overlap between critical realism and the transformative or the critical research position in terms of the types of topics covered but it's usually more about exposing certain myths or lies that maintain oppressive structures or to uncover hidden aspects of observable events the difference is that transformative or critical school does not necessarily believe that there's an external reality where critical realists do so so they will go about their research project projects a bit differently because of that belief even if it's about similar topics than transformative critical research

21:33 decoy positions want to challenge the shortcomings and the damaging beliefs and descriptions and constructions of former colonized people also transform and change society but specifically on issues that has historical baggage of racism and oppression of coloniality most decal studies either break down colonial ways or build up new ways new ways include studying africa from within focusing on ethics and the responsibility of the researcher the relationship between different aspects of research and in terms of breaking down coloniality research is often about critiquing euro western theory or practices so if you are a positivist you will probably not choose an organizational

22:19 communication topic or concept that is about understanding people and their behavior their attitudes their experiences and so on but you will choose a topic that is more about things like determining the effect of a marketing campaign on sales figures or measuring aspects of maybe social media reach or social media audiences in most student settings it's not really feasible to do cause and effect or impact studies because you need a lot of time and multiple measurements often and many of the studies are out to measure or accurately describe a communication phenomenon or maybe more post-positivist anyway so they sometimes use quantitative measurement but focus on measuring human

23:06 things like behaviors perceptions attitudes but if you're an interpretivist you will favor topics that are specifically about human experiences feelings perceptions and understanding those in depth and you'll steer clear of measuring and controlling intentions and and and variables however interpretivism might be less suited for all topics that imply a certain moral judgment from the start interpretivism is about understanding human stuff in a more general sense in an empathetic way and oftentimes without passing a certain moral judgment if your topic implies that you believe something specific about your topic like

23:52 almost like an activist sense or a political sense maybe you're a communist or a feminist interpretivism might not be ideal because you are thinking about your topic rather like a transformative or critical scholar and if you call this study an interpretive study while it's actually a transformative or critical study you lose a bit of that conceptual coherence that is crucial to to for research to make sense the same goes for deciding between transformative and critical studies and maybe critical realism your beliefs could easily be compatible with both these positions but when you choose a topic let's say about the oppression of women in the workplace if you focus on just on hearing what women say proposing

24:38 changes in the workplace to lace and oppression then you are more aligned to critical and transformative research beliefs but if you focus on issues you regard as hidden or obscured by policy or history or practice then you might be more of a critical realist in this instance because of the observable unobservable type of dichotomy that is mostly a critical realistic or if you focus on oppression of women in the workplace and all you are also interested in bla only black for african women in south africa and going in the direction of looking at south africa's racist history and history of um of corporate oppression and so on in terms of of colonial histories then decal might be based because of the

25:24 specific angle you have on a similar topic um even though you know it could be in principle the oppression of women in the workplace could be compatible with multiple positions it depends on your angle where it will fit based along the same lines is the consideration of certain theoretical traditions and specific communication theories in our case certain traditions essentially belong to a certain philosophical orientation like the functional tradition is about usefulness of communication in organizational settings the outcome of certain communication practices and like a fragmented specific type of view of communication phenomena for instance this tradition theoretical tradition is

26:10 closely linked to positivism and post for positivism so if your topic calls for specific theory and the theory is from a functionalist tradition then you cannot blindly set out to do an interpretivist study sometimes it's easy um like it's easy to see that critical theory and interpretations of critical theory about certain organizational topics is compatible with transformative or critical positions even decal as as in our previous example but other times it's not so easy like the very famous excellence theory of public relations this is often associated with functionalism but it's not super clear from the theory itself um but it's more found in the critiques of that theory by other scholars that this is more functionalist so basing

26:57 your study on excellence theory while taking a decal position might seem like a good idea on the surface but if you look deeper you might find that they are not truly aligned or stakeholder theory is also very famous and it's often used in organizational communication it's often used to inform studies about relationships and we might think it's easily compatible with decal for instance because relationality is core in both that theory and in the in the research position but what if you found that this theory is solidly founded on the belief that capitalism is the best economic system and it uses the assumption that rationality is supreme to other forms of reasoning

27:42 will you still think this theory is right for a decal study if you know this about your your theory and the creators of your theory but uh if you know your research position is um is aligned more with anti-capitalism or questioning capitalism and definitely definitely questioning the idea of euro waste and rationality being superior to other forms of reasoning those are the interesting type of theoretical questions now our tutorial is not about theory specifically but i want you to be aware of those kinds of alignments because they are important when you um when you transform a topic an idea to a research problem before you can get to your methodology so while theory is not

28:28 really our thing um you can't really separate the two things completely then besides the philosophical and theoretical considerations you also need to think about like more practical stuff like more specific things in order to formulate a solid research problem you have to think systematically and rigorously about some aspects of it for a topic to become a research problem it must be in the first place feasible the research that you will need to solve the problem must be manageable in terms of time and cost and skills and access for instance if you have a research problem that comes

29:14 down to getting information that is subtle or that people might not want to share with you you might not get access to that information and this includes maybe like sensitive stuff like whistle blowing or human biases or criminal behaviors or rule breaking it must also be something that you can afford or your funding can afford you must be able to do this in terms of skills and knowledge and the work uh and the work required must practically fit into the timeline or the specifications of uh your project and the rest of your life for example we this is why we say you cannot really do longitudinal research maybe for an undergrad or an honest level project but because you have limited time to do this

29:59 and longitudinal work is just plainly impossible in in that timeline you must also think of practical stuff in terms of you as a person if you have children at home you won't be able to to do a study that requires you to roam the streets at night to find sex workers to interview so such a topic will not be able you will not be able to turn into a researchable problem for you then there's answerability you must also consider other things that influence whether you can actually do the work and this is can this question be answered some problems can't be solved through research and some questions are really not answerable if you want to prove issues um of belief you will probably not able to get to proof and the

30:46 question cannot be answered in in that way if it's formulated like that some questions are also biased in such a way that the answer becomes almost worthless let's say you want to study why women are better than men as managers the problem is biased because you already assume that they are better so the answer might not even mean much even if you can get to an answer to that question because you started out in a biased way so the answerability requirement is is for you to think about the things of your of your of your main issue itself whether it's biased and whether it's actually something that fits together proving beliefs is maybe difficult for instance or measuring effects if you

31:31 are not actually doing an effect study and and so on to bring this brings us to the to the next things um relevance and value now research issues must be relevant to either real life or to theory um so it's not worth doing research about something that will make people go yeah so what if your research does not contribute anything the topic is not worth studying a link to this and it's also crucial that a research problem should have a reasonable scope if the scope is too wide you will need too many resources and it won't be feasible if the scope is too narrow you will end up with too little substance to add any value also related to the scope is the idea of specificity a research problem must be

32:16 specific in terms of the issue and the context you can usually not include an entire field of specialization such as marketing communication or public relations but you need to focus on a specific aspect like when we discussed before when we looked at topics and concepts in organizational communication what is it specifically in that field is it the relationship between two stakeholder groups that that forms part of the pr field in this in this case or is it about how marketing strategy is approached and this is part of marketing comms but it's more specific than just the entire field like that for organizational communication for instance you also have to think about the specifics of the organization or the

33:03 industry or the sector you are going to focus on are you focusing on one organization on more than one on an entire industry on organizations of a certain size or geographic location so saying um that your topic is public relations in mining is not good but something like the role of social media in the public relations efforts of a book or minerals that is a much more specific and the type of way you should be thinking about this and your in in this case uh i want to show you the organizational context specifically or maybe the relationship between a book or minerals and their key stakeholders that might work but you can also focus on an entire industry like stakeholder engagement in

33:49 black owned mining companies in south africa then you will include more than one organization but your topic is still specific in terms of that context because we know you have selected a certain segment of an industry that is built into the purpose of your of your work different philosophical positions also require you to think differently about these considerations of feasibility answerability scope value relevance specificity like if you're a post-positivist you should also consider for instance the feasibility of your study because you should be striving to get a representative sample and general generalizable findings and that changes the scope requirement of your study for example and if you're a transformative scholar your study will

34:36 definitely not end up contributing or being relevant or valuable if it doesn't make a difference in the real world because that is what a trans a good transformative study is judged on can you see that these things all hang together and you cannot see them as separately i i hope that is my intention with with this tutorial and i hope you you can see it from from this another important detail is the language and terminology you use now this is not limited to thinking about the research topic and problem of course but if you forget about it in the early stages of the research study when we are laying the foundations for our work and making important decisions it could have some far-reaching effects for for the project going on just like certain disciplines

35:22 theoretical traditions and philosophical positions lead us in terms of which topics we choose and what we focus on it also directs the type of language we use when we formulate our research problems and other specifics around the problem every philosophical position theoretical tradition academic discipline has certain ways of talking arguing asking questions and specific terms that are associated with with these for instance terms like impact effect cause relationship when that relationship is referring to different variables not the relationship between people determine proof or prove these are usually terms associated with positivism or with functionalism in a

36:08 theoretical sense and then terms like dismantle de-link counter knowledge counter discourse counter creations pluriversality ways of being ways of knowing centering positionality these type of terms are terms we associate it with a decal group of paradigmatic positions so just so every position has certain words and certain ways of saying things that are kind of true for that position and you need to consider that language of the position when you choose a topic and formulate a research problem from it to make a topic research ready you have to firstly put your idea together with your academic discipline and then filter it through your

36:53 philosophical position and other important aspects of of your research you do this by contemplating things like feasibility answerability scope specificity relevance and value of your work then you formulate your research problem you write it out in a way that is systematic and formal using the correct terminology and language to clarify all these questions that you have that you have figured out conceptually to show the conceptual coherence of your work now based on your on your research problem you further break it down by formulating things like a research problem statement or a purpose statement maybe subproblems research questions hypotheses specific research objectives

37:41 and so on we will talk about that part of the transformation more in tutorial seven and in the subsequent tutorials on research methodology in the first three to follow specifically we will talk a lot more about these conceptual matters that can also help you clarify topic once you start formulating it into a research problem for your own work enjoy your reading until we speak again bye