How Things Work - Doha Academy of Tertiary Studies

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tionships. But it is just as important to plan to (what mountain climbers
call) “reconnoiter” the research design. Identifying and directing review
panels is a greatly underused strategy. The panel can be large or small,
formal or informal, and often should include persons with special experience
or viewpoints, some of them different from the researcher’s. Yes,
one needs the support of admirers, but often the recognition of flaws and
foolishness is more important.
7.7. PROGRessive FOcusiNG
Informal triangulation occurs as we carefully monitor progress of the
research. The meanings of things need to be reconsidered all during the
research. Let’s examine the words of an early behaviorist, Ivan Pavlov
(1936), advising his students:
Gradualness! About this most important condition of fruitful scientific
work, I never can speak without emotion. Gradualness, gradualness, gradualness.
From the very beginning of your work, school yourself to severe
gradualness in the accumulation of knowledge. (Bartlett, 1968, p. 818)
His advice should ring a bell: to school ourselves in deliberate accumulation
of knowledge. That includes the growing knowledge of our research
question, our methods, our sources of data, and whatever helps us with
interpretation. Gradualness, care, skepticism, revision.
In our graduate schools, some professors urge students to come to
understand a problem thoroughly before designing a study and before
spending time in the field gathering data. But those are two different
things. Often, spending time in the field is an essential part of designing
a study. Yes, we want preliminary understanding of the research question.
New researchers need extra time to get ready. There is too little
time to learn the issues once in the field. We need to be prepared. We
need to have practiced our methods. Still, the feeling among many qualitative
researchers is that we often have been too committed to a plan, too
fixated upon using certain variables, at the time we begin gathering data.
We should be gradual, redesigning the study as we are doing it.
Sociologist Malcolm Parlett and historian David Hamilton (1977)
spoke about three stages at which qualitative researchers (1) observe, (2)
inquire further, and then (3) seek to explain. They said: