Tutorial 4 - Introduction to Methodology

0:00 hello everyone in the previous tutorial we talked about research topics and research problems and getting from a research topic an idea to a formalized written out research problem now we will talk about the further unpacking of research problems into problem statements purpose statements research questions specific research questions and objectives but in this tutorial we are moving on to methodology this is an introductory tutorial to give you an idea of the concepts we used in the following methodological tutorials and i will talk shortly about methodology research approaches research

0:46 designs specific research methods as you can see from the recap on the screen in tutorial 1 we said that in a philosophical sense the term methodology refers to the study of methods or maybe the theory of methods or the science of finding out if we see it similarly to other philosophical assumptions methodology is the logics of how to do research the logics of practically generating knowledge or to put it differently methodological assumptions are those philosophical assumptions or beliefs about how we do research including the principles techniques procedures and so on methodology as from tutorial 1 is the

1:33 practical side of epistemology how we practically study what we believe can be known now more specific for today the term methodology is used in many different ways in academic writing and you will see methodology used interchangeably with for instance research methods but for our purposes methodology is the higher term the one that refers to the whole story of methods the whole journey of executing research but when you spot the word method methodology and others you should keep in mind that people use them differently many decolonial scholars of course show their epistemic disobedience by not using the term at all or others might refer to what i would call a research

2:19 design but call but but name it something like a note on method or a word on methodology or something like that and some qualitative scholars prefer to use the term research procedures and you'll see many variations as you read methodology methodological framework research approach research strategy and so on but i see the following methodological details as part of what i consider to be methodology the research approach the research design the specific research methods and all the details about the execution of a research project now just this methodology has different meanings and the term is used in

3:04 different ways it's also important that you know that what i call a research approach is not called that by everyone i refer to the research approach as the general methodological orientation like quantitative qualitative multi-method triangulation so on but in textbooks and scholarly works you will read a variety of things the qualcomm type of differentiation is something that some people call a research paradigm a research strategy a methodological orientation and many more names it's also called research design in some cases because as you will see as the tutorials progress sometimes the research design and the research approach are kind of one thing or that a specific research design

3:51 implies a definite specific research orientation so it's not necessary to separate them but when it comes to the word approach we also see it used in many different ways it's understandable because approach is basically a word that means in everyday language a way of dealing with things so we could apply to many things that need to be dealt with sometimes the term is used in a more general research sense so not a methodological sense so you can get for instance a critical approach or a decolonial approach we also talk about a theoretical approach or the philosophical approach and many other approaches we also use the term approach when we refer to our approach to reasoning and relationship between theory and resource

4:37 search like inductive approach and deductive approach but in this specific context i talk about the approach as in the methodological sense specifically in a um traditional euro western sense of of thinking about methodology there is the qualitative versus quantitative approaches as the two big ones and then there is like a number of multi-method ways multi-method multi-modal um mixed methods and so on and then there's also some approaches that are in between the two and some approaches that we can say are beyond them now in tutorial five we talk more about research approaches and in tutorial six more about research design in short i

5:24 think the easiest way for me to understand it is to think of research approach as the strategy and research design as the implementation plan for that strategy let's talk about research design a little bit next so as i say when i refer to research design i refer to the plan for implementing or executing the research according to what is prescribed by the general approach or the general orientation research designs in this sense it's mostly a thing of planning a plan on for how research is going to be conducted the who the where the when and the that type of planning now in tutorial six and seven we will talk a lot more about research design but for now just the basics so that you can get a general

6:09 sense of what's going on a research design you know they it can be more complex and more simple sometimes a project like an interdisciplinary work or a work with a big scope has come a more complicated design but it's not necessarily so that a complex design it makes a good design sometimes a simple design is the best thing you can do some designs are also flexible while others are rigid and planned ahead of time and followed by the letter where the the flexible ones are will change as the research is carried out you can also sort research designs by type depending on whether your research is empirical or not and by what kinds of data you are using the nature of that

6:55 data and many other details some research designs are like blueprints or recipes they have specific there are specific designs with specific names like a case study design or an online ethnographic design and so on others are actually just a systematic discussion of the process and the methods were without a name given for the design specifically conventionally a research design is first discussed in general and then it's followed by discussion of the different specific research methods that form part of the design in detail to give proper body to your research design when i say specific research methods or just research methods i'm talking about the different means of collecting

7:41 data some people will call this data collection methods but i i prefer research methods in the tutorial series that will come later this year we will cover specific research methods that we often see in organizational communication research in much more detail and cover things like variety within each method the types of data we can generate through certain methods and how population sampling instrumentation and data collection and analysis work for for each of them in the graphic that's that's on your screen you can see some of the specific research methods that we will unpack in more detail in the tutorial series on practical research methods um but this introduction

8:27 is short and sweet and it's over now because in the next tutorial we will be delving deeper into research approaches so i hope it meant something to you to have a little bit of an introduction and enjoy your reading until we see each other again bye