Research and the Theoretical Field - Pauldowling.me

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discourse in which the key terms and procedures of research methods are
defined and described and related to one another. Furthermore, much of this
is strongly institutionalised discourse in that you might expect to find
considerable similarities between what is being presented on this course and
the content of other postgraduate programmes and texts on educational
research methods. In some contrast to this is the kind of writing that students
are expected to produce for assessment. In general terms, the course tutors
will be asking students to produce a coherent academic argument. Tutors are,
in my experience, very good at identifying and assessing academic
arguments; there is rarely (on courses that I have taught on) been much
disagreement between first and second internal markers and the external
examiner. What they are not so good at is providing explicit principles defining
exactly what constitutes an academic argument. Generally, then, this is a
strongly institutionalised practice, but its principles are not explicit. The
distinction between these two strongly institutionalised aspects of the
programme is in terms of the extent to which strategies are put in place to
establish the principles of the practice explicitly within discourse. I refer to this
variable as the level of discursive saturation; principled research methods are
high discursive saturation (DS + ); the evaluation of writing in terms of the
appropriateness of its academic argument is comparatively low discursive
saturation (DS - ). The other variable that I am concerned with here is the level
of institutionalisation. Both of the forms that I have thus far introduced exhibit
high levels of institutionalisation (I + ). We might argue that the basis of the
strong institutionalisation of these forms is that they are established publicly
within what should broadly be understood as an economic activity, insofar as
the university must establish the general marketability of its courses and
qualifications. Programmes, such as the MRes, may also come under the
scrutiny of agencies such as the ESRC, where institutions apply for such
courses to be recognised as legitimate routes into, say, the ESRC three-year
doctoral studentship programme.
Other aspects of research education are less public. When you engage on
your dissertation, for example, you will need to perform analysis on the data.
Indeed, conducting a literature review entails analysis as such a review also
has to establish a line of argument, each item will need to be distinguished
from some other items in some ways and identified in various ways with
others etc. Clearly, there will be scope for discussion with your tutor, but the
bulk of this kind of work is most frequently done in private, by the student. In
the case of quantitative analysis, the analysis of the data may be considered
to be comparatively public insofar as standard protocols are used. However,
the conceptual work that is essential in designing the research is, again,
mostly conducted in private. Of course, the outcomes of these processes are
open to scrutiny, but not the actual tactics employed, which generally remain
invisible. This is why there is comparatively little written in the research
methods literature on the actual details of doing analysis: this is DS - /I -
practice. As I have said, the outcome of your analysis is rendered available to
public scrutiny and, insofar as it articulates DS + /I + theory, then it will have to
be of this form. To the extent, however, that the analysis claims to generate
new theory, then it will be moving into the area of low institutionalisation,
DS + /I - . The schema is presented as Figure 8.3.
RESEARCH & THE THEORETICAL FIELD