How Things Work - Doha Academy of Tertiary Studies

Stating the Problem 81
Each of them is an excellent question, but even one of them could
be stretching the study too far. Adding all three in some depth probably
would be too large a topical coverage even for a dissertation. The
embrace would be lost. It is usually all right to change a research question
a little, but to pursue well these last questions might call for three
additional studies. Or she might be able to give a few hours and a page
or two to each question, a mere arousal for her readers.
With the research question well in mind, Marie will do the study her
way. Another researcher would choose a different research question and
do a different study. For the vitality of the international community of
researchers, it is important to have researchers selecting their own things
to study and studying them in their own way. Still, with the experience
and personal preferences that researchers have, it could be a mistake for
Marie not to seek out a few from that community for advice.
Each time Marie modifies a research question, she needs to decide
afresh whether the answers or stories or relationships she wants are
something that people somewhere already know. (If yes, she needs to
collect and interpret them.) Or whether the answers are not known by
people but will rise out of the observations and analysis of the data.
For example, if she wants to study what it is like to become a workshop
director, then she will probably get good knowledge by asking people
who are experienced directors. But if she wants to relate how directors
make choices under stress, she probably will become better informed
by observing them in stress situations. Where lies the knowledge? If she
observes the directors, it is up to her more than to them to make the
interpretations for her report. Of course she may draw a director or others
into helping with her interpreting.
This is a major strategic choice: expecting the interpretations to come
from the “data source” people (e.g., interviewees, authors) or expecting
the interpretations to rise up out of your aggregation of scores and
observations. I sometimes call the two interpretive data and aggregative
data. If you interview participants having experienced a poor program,
getting lots of quotes that you interpret as pertinent to your research
question, we call them interpretive data. If you interview participants
using the same structured questions for all and tally and analyze the
results to get a sense of what is typical and what is dissimilar, we call it
getting aggregative data. In leaning more toward immediate interpretation
or toward aggregation, either way you are taking a step toward
refining your research question. As indicated in the previous chapters,
interpretive data find more of a home in qualitative research than in