Methods, Doing research in Design
I came back from the summer break and it’s time to work again. I began to re read Doing research in Design (Christopher Crouuch and Jane Pearce, bloosmbury) again and here is todays’ reading, the chapter 5, Dong research: From methodologies to methods where how to develop the methodology according to the research questions and the qualitative/quantitive design methods are well explained. Below are quotes:
A key role of research in the social realm is to create knowledge that leads to solutions of societal problems (Greenwood& Levin, 2008)
Designers engage with the social world, and an important role of design is to initiate change (Jones, 1991)
Good design is good citizenship (Milton Glaser)
those views leading to the questions such as,
Why conduct this research?
What is worthwhile about it?
How might your research contribute to the existing knowledge in the field or lead to changed perspectives or practices?
Who would benefit from your work and how?
2. The perspectival and partial nature of research should be considered when thinking about the goal of research.
3. Qualitative research method:
your intention is to understand in some depth(not width) experiences of a small group of people.
The methods grow logically from the methodological framework within which the research sits.
Reality is subjective and value-laden, and hence there is an emphasis on exploring researcher reflexivity.
A typical research text is the interview transcript. Taking account the cultural/social contexts and the relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee are important when interpreting the transcript.
It takes place in naturalistic settings, it’s very important to describe the researcher’s understanding of these settings.
Analysis of data: identify the strong themes, the patterns or trends or the essence of what is revealed. it varies depending on whether it is to test existing hypotheses or to generate new theories.
Qualitative research is typically inductive and open-ended so that analysis is typically an exploratory, creative and iterative. The data is examined until saturation is achieved and all possible ways of interpreting have been explored.
Hypothesis testing (deductive analysis) and hypothesis generation (inductive analysis) work together in a way that any new working hypothesis developed from the ground up can then be further put to the test.
Analysis: giving meaning to the data. The goal of analysis is to produce anew research test, in which the research ‘story’ is told effectively and convincingly, by drawing on the important patterns and themes that have emerged from the research.
The criteria of judging a qualitative research: the rigor of the research ensuring that participants’ experiences are faithfully represented and the extent the research achieved for the enhanced and deepened understanding of the phenomenon.
Stating a purpose and posing a research problem or questions
Decide about who should be involved and what kind of data is needed to answer the question and how it should be analyzed.
Decide how the results should be presented
4. Narrowing down and opening up.
breaking down the design brief to a few subquestions and revisiting the main research question out of them.
(See page table 2 page 81. It shows the questions and data collection, analysis and presentation methods that naturally coming from them. )
- Keep reading next chapter(Ethnography and observation)
-Revisit my main research question following the way this book suggested. It is still vague. -> reflect the thought when making my research brief.
- Keep reading the relevant literature and try to find my folks! (also relevant conferences and journals and scholars)
