How Things Work - Doha Academy of Tertiary Studies

Writing the Final Report 199
having special training, routines, and sensitivities. What especially characterizes
this view is the fact that how things work varies with the situation.
There are the legendary professions— medicine, law, ministry, and
education—with experience and understanding of the human situation,
collectively and case by case. Their members decide—from observation
and inquiry, from training and experience, with ethical standards—how
to work within the strictures and theories they face. Similarly exercising
choice in human care are the practitioners of old and new professions,
the trainer, the nurse, the counselor, the city planner, the physical therapist,
the psychometrist. Into what knowledge reservoirs do they reach
when faced with a new problem?
Professional practice relies heavily on qualitative inquiry. However
refined the methods used, it is expected that the choices of action will
not be mechanically determined but must be reached through interpretation.
Those interpretations will depend on the experience of the
researcher, the experience of those being studied, and the experience of
those to whom information will need to be conveyed. The professional
knowledge of our reports relies heavily on personal experience within an
organizational setting.
Some professionals remain hungry for further experience. Some do
not. Agency officials and supporters want to know how things are working
in various settings for which they have responsibility. They may have
little confidence that your research can give them vicarious experience
in as sophisticated a way as they would have by seeing it themselves.
They are experienced in the disciplined study of the particular. You are
aspiring to that too. And you are learning, partly from this book, how to
write your final reports with a qualitative research discipline that most
of them do not have.