What are research methds?

Question

What are research methds?

Answer 1

Digging holes in the ground to see what's down there.

Devising a test and testing people.

Going to libraries and plowing through books.

Making phone calls and talking to living people in those books.

Doing field work.

Talking with other experts in other areas to see if what they know might help you.

Answer 2

I did a course in research methods when I was 13 (but age probably doesn't mean anything as I'm an unschooler and so don't follow age appropriate curricula etc!).

Anyway the course I did was all about investigating the ways to do research; how to set up a research project; the problems involved in conducting research; various tests you can use to interpret data; the differences between good and bad data, good and bad research etc; various categories like ordinal, nominal, cardinal, discrete data etc; the process for submitting a piece of research to a peer reviewed journal; and a pretty big whack of statistics.

There will probably be a heap of text books explaining research methods and what it entails in your local library if you have a look.

Answer 3

I'm taking a Research Methods in Psychology course at the university.

We're learning about not just how to research, or where to look, but what good/bad research and results are, ethical research, animal testing, etc.

Answer 4

Ways you find information.

Interviewing people, going to the library, and watching documentaries are all research methods.

Answer 5

#1 is correct. "Research methods" is also a term that refers to specific ways of choosing research subjects and gathering information. For example, quantitative and qualitative research are two different methods (one deals with collecting numerical data, and the other with collecting data that is harder to quantify, such as cause and effect, growth, feelings and opinions, etc.). Other research methods include ethnography, case studies and so on. Wikipedia will give you a good definition of these terms--it's a little complicated at first, but take it one step at a time.

Answer 6

Ways to gather and organize the information you find.

When you watch a lot of talk shows on TV, it becomes pretty obvious that there are talking heads who either don't know what they are talking about, or they don't want to say anything bad about the companies that do the advertising there or that own the news media.  

Get at a copy of Consumer's Union magazine (the organization that refuses to accept any advertising) and compare their coverage of some topic with coverage in magazines that do accept advertising ... you will find a world of difference, as different as night and day, in what they are telling us about those products.

Watch Congressional hearings on C-Span where they identify serious problems needing fixing, then watch carefully for what Congress does about it ... notice how many votes are along partisan lines, as if they are ignoring what came out in the hearings.

Go to WWW.GAO.GOV and sign up for their daily digests of links to reports they do for Congress   Each of those reports is a model of how a research report could appear.  They are also a model of stuff wrong in our society that takes forever to get fixed.

You can develop a set of questions, then go out and ask a bunch of people the same questions, carefully record their answers, then by question compare the different answers.  It helps to have for each person some statistics like gender, race, religion, approx age, if the questions are relevant to that stuff.

There are reference books, which try to be factual, but all might have some kind of bias.  Suppose there was a recent war that one side won (it can be argued that in the Cold War, we were all a bunch of losers), then history books were written by the people on the winning side, the losing side (if any of them are left), and by people from neutral countries.  It can be expected that the versions of history won't all be the same.

Then there are issues like

* Who discovered the New World?  Columbus, Erikson of the Vikings, Chinese

* First person to invent something when a bunch invented at about the same time

* Just about everything Americans claim to have invented, the Russians said they invented it first, and other people say it was neither, it was the German scientists they imported after WW II

so you need to know how to go to various sources of info and evaluate what their bias probably is, and factor that into comparing what different sources have to say about the same thing.

Remember that some places don't cite where they get their info, and they might be getting it from the same places.