The final blog post

This is the final blog post for the course, and this time the assignment is to reflect upon what we’ve learned and how combining methods can be used to answer complex research methods.

The first week started out quite philosophical by reading texts by Kant and Socrates on what knowledge is and how it’s built upon what we perceive or on logical argumentation. The terms a priori and a posteriori were introduced, which have been influencing the following parts of the course. To me, it’s been a new way of thinking divided into what our experiences and senses tell us, and what we understand through logical argumentation like the discussion between Socrates and Theaetetus showed. It was completely eye-opening and I found it to be a very interesting seminar. Through the theme, we discussed how research is based on our senses and how our perception is influenced by every condition we live under, such as time, culture, what gender we have and what time we live in. This also meant that the term ‘objectivity’ had to reconsidered. The following week, what we learned was connected to dialectic which is a method to seek truth by rational arguments. The method part of the course was about to start, but not completely yet. First we had to go through trying to define what theory is, which turned out to be more easy to do by discussing what theory is not.

It wasn’t obvious in the beginning why we started in this end, but through the course it has become clear why. By starting with these concepts and discussing knowledge, perception and objectivity, we got tools to discuss science and research. This connected to the second part of the course - methods in research. The philosophical approach has been a way to question the knowledge we collect and actually reflect upon what it is we are gathering in research, how it is used to form theory and what theory actually is, and to not throw around with the word ‘objective’ without actually be aware of what it means.

The second part was more practical and more hands-on what we actually will perform in terms of methods when doing research, even though it wasn’t meant for learning exactly how to perform different task but more for awareness of which methods there are and when they are suitable, what it’s benefits are and what limitations they hold. When the course stopped being as philosophical, it seems like the participants of the course had a consensus on what the methods implicated which made the different blog posts I’ve read seem more in line with each other.

Key concepts of the method part have been qualitative and quantitative studies, case studies and design research. It was emphasized during a lecture with Haibo Lee, which a unfortunately wasn’t able to attend but have catched up on afterward, the importance of formulating the research question. This was illustrated by a clip from the movie “Johnny English”, where it seemed like the main character always could find easier and more straightforward ways.

So from a more hands-on, practical point of view, we learned the importance of formulating what you study. We also put quite a lot of time into discussing how to do it and how different methods can be appropriate for different circumstances. If you aim to seize people’s opinion, qualitative methods can be to prefer, but if you study people’s reaction then maybe quantitative methods could be better if you don’t want to interfere with the study and by mistake affect the participants. To perform different methods, such as interviews, requires skills to not affect the result. Other situations, and for example if there is a unique situation, a case study is another strategy in research. In this, you can combine methods. I think what’s been most valuable during this part of the course has been to discuss how combining methods is important and to put a lot of time into the research design. When conducting a study, you need to be perfectly clear to begin with what you are looking for and aware of different methods strengths and weaknesses. Something I will remember when starting my thesis work will be to do pilot studies before actually starting the research, because I learned during my bachelor thesis work that the first interview I held wasn’t exactly the same as the last one since I found out early on what wasn’t working from what I’d planned beforehand. Even if you put time into research design, you don’t know until you try. This is why it’s also important to do user tests if you make user design research, which is another area I might come across later on being in the field of media technology.

I think the setup of the course has been great. To read a lot of material and first try to reflect upon it on your own to then attend seminars and discuss it under relaxed circumstances meant to give you knowledge to reevaluate what you’ve learned and then make a last reflection. To end by giving and getting feedback from others have been very fruitful.

Something I would have liked to have is a lecture on is how to analyze data when you have it. The focus for this course have been how to gather it in the best way, and how to look at it and understand that you never will get the absolute truth. But how to handle the data is another story and would have been interesting. It was mentioned in a lecture that research comes from analyzing and not gathering. So after discussing what guidelines there are to how many times you should do a test and how many participants the study should include, it would have been interesting to talk about what to do with the results. This might be difficult without real situations and I think this will discussed when we do the thesis work. In this course we touched upon it when we discussed that research can be made to strengthen existing theory or to build new theory, and both are equally relevant. We also discussed it in the beginning of the course when we stated that results actually could turn out the same over and over due to coincidence. So overall, I think it’s been a very interesting and eye-opening course that will come of use for me later on in my studies and work, and I'm looking forward to being able to use it.