Something happened at my children’s school the other day that prompted me to muse again about interpretivism. It doesn’t matter what exactly the incident was, but let’s say that it was something as simple as a teacher asking some pupils to keep the noise down during a group task. How many different ways are there …
Category: doing research
Musings on focus groups
Several of my students have used, or are planning to use, focus groups in their research projects. I’ve seen this method of data collection used in rigorous research settings as well as looser market or customer research settings and have been pondering on the pros and cons presented. ‘A focus group saves so much time …
Musings on sampling
A couple of things happened recently that set me thinking about sampling. The first was a brilliant webinar hosted by the British Academy of Management (BAM). The speaker was a quantitative researcher and was giving tips on how to present quantitative data analysis successfully. I lean naturally toward qualitative work so I attended the webinar …
Musings on rating scales
It’s the Christmas break, I’ve stopped work and I’m officially on holiday. I’m relaxing and enjoying myself and definitely not thinking about research issues. Except… yesterday while we were having our lunch my children mentioned that they had filled in a survey at school before they broke up for the holidays. Naturally, my ears pricked …
Musings on why I am a researcher
The other day I watched a film called Frequencies with my husband and daughter. It was all about a world in which people emitted some sort of frequency – high, low or in between. It wasn’t entirely clear whether these were sound frequencies, light frequencies or some other kind of frequency, but go with it …
Musings on finding time to do research
Research isn’t something you can fit in around other things. You can’t do 10 minutes on it right now in between those two meetings. You can’t squeeze in half an hour while you’re having lunch. You can’t do it while you’re trying to help the children with their homework. You can’t do 20 minutes every …
Musings on curiosity
When my brother and I were very young, he complained that I broke some of his toys, specifically toy guns (he had a super pop gun with a little cork on a piece of string - I don't think I broke that one). I had wanted to know how they worked, so I took them …
Musings on ways of doing research (and socks)
There are some words and phrases you will encounter in methodological discussions and it’s important to understand what they mean and how they are used by researchers. Let’s start with ‘methodology’ itself. I tell my students that ‘method’ is what you do and the ‘ology’ is why and how you’re doing it that way. A …
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Musings on methodology 