Research Methods for post-

graduate students
Lecture 2
Exploring rationales and approaches to educational research
Felix Maringe (Professor of Higher Education)
 Core arguments
• Research is a structured and systematic way of discovering new
knowledge. As such its conduct is predictable and follows a
prescribed order.
• At the end of the day, consumers of research want to know how
much trust and faith they can invest in your discoveries and more
importantly, if the discoveries extend the envelope of
understanding about the topic.
• It is important therefore to develop a good understanding of the
general architecture of research and to understand why the
researcher makes certain methodological choices.
The questions I try to address in this lecture

What topics in this

What type of a What field/s of study What specific What paradigm/s seem
field arouse my
researcher am I and will my research be question/s deserve my appropriate for my
interest the most and
why? located and why? attention and why? research and why?
why?

What does the

What methods will I
literature already tell How shall I ensure that
How shall I design my deploy to gather the How will I analyse and
us about my questions my research is
research and why? evidence; how and interpret the data?
and what gaps still conducted ethically?
why?
exist?

How will I write up the

research and publish
it?
The architecture of the research process
• Understanding self as a researcher
• Understanding the field and questions
• Understanding the paradigmatic context of the research
• Understanding methodological terrain and making the appropriate
choices
• Understanding ethical principles and data collection
• Understanding principles of analysis and interpretation
• Using the accepted writing protocols for your research
Understanding self as a researcher
• Do you have any previous research experience or training background?
• What methods of research have you used successfully before?
• Why do you think the methods you have used before provide strong
evidence?
• Do you understand the limitations of the methods and how have you tried to
overcome these in the past?
Write a positionality statement covering the following:
1. Your background and who you are
2. Your research interests
3. Your training and experience background
4. Your research orientation
5. Your biases and how these might influence your research
Understanding the field
• What is the broad field of your research?
• What experience do you bring to the field?
• What specific topics excite you and why?
• Can you write a topic about this field, a main question and about 4
sub questions about this field?
• What research has been conducted about this field/topic>
• What seems to be well established and less well established
about this topic?
• What would happen if no research was not undertaken in this
topic?
Conducting a literature review
Literature review enables us to understand the conceptual field, the empirical
research in the area, the strong and weak evidence, and the areas that still
need more research.
A good structure for a literature review could include:
1. Begin by defining your understaninding of the idea and purposes of a
literature review, types and how you propose to conduct your own.
2. Conceptual field (a discussion of the key conceptual ideas about the topic
3. Theoretical underpinnings of the study (what specific theories appear to be
used most frequently in this area?)
4. Empirical research (summary of the research already done about the topic,
including a summary of what is already well known and less well known
Paradigms of educational research
• Positivist Research Paradigm
• Interpretivist Research Paradigm
• Critical Theory Research Paradigm
Group work:
1. Read the article at (PDF) An introduction to research paradigms (researchgate.net) and
write down the full bibliometric reference of the article
2. Join one of the three groups and answer the following questions:
3. Give a brief historical origin of the paradigm
4. what are the rationales behind the paradigm and what are the circumstances in which this
paradigm works best
5. What are the epistemological, ontological, axiological and methodological assumptions
behind the paradigms?
6. What are some of the major challenges and criticisms associated with the paradigm?
7. Identify someone who can report back the group’s answers to the class.
Designing your research
• Design is the blue-print for your research indicating the major decisions
you will take at critical moments
• A research design is a strategy for answering your research question using
empirical data.
• Creating a research design means making decisions about:
1. Your overall research objectives and approach
2. Whether you’ll rely on primary research or secondary research
3. Your sampling methods or criteria for selecting subjects
4. Your data collection methods
5. The procedures you’ll follow to collect data
6, Your data analysis methods
Quantitative research methods
Methods which result in the gathering of numerical data which can
be subjected to statistical analysis. They include:
1. Experimental (based on experimental and control group).
2. Quasi experimental (where the allocation of a control group is
not possible, usually involve pre and post intervention results to
determine the effects)
3. Surveys (especially those which gather quantitative data, such
as household surveys, census data, opinion surveys,
satisfaction surveys etc.)
Qualitative research methods (look at What Is
Qualitative Research? | Methods & Examples (scribbr.com)

These tend to collect non numerical data, such as people’s

opinions, customer satisfaction, where the actual expressed words
are analysed for meaning
1. Individual interviews
2. Focus group interviews
3. Biographies, autobiographies and narratives
4. Ethnographic research
5. Content analysis
6. Case studies
Mixed methods research
• As no one method can exhaustively explain a phenomenon, often
there is need to use both quantitative and qualitative data.
• The data can be collected simultaneously (concurrent mixed
methods); or sequentially (sequential mixed methods)
• For example, when the population/samples are independent of
each other, concurrent method can be used. When the
population/sample is the same, then a sequential treatment can
be justified.
• A sequential approach can also be used on the same population
to determine if the data might be complementary
Group work
• In groups of 4, read the prescribed texts on quantitative and
qualitative methods.
• Select one of the methods and indicate why it is relevant to the
study of your topic.
• How would you collect the data for this topic
• What challenges are you likely to experience and how might you
overcome them?
• How would you rationalize the use of mixed methods research for
a study seeking to determine ways in which a school is
implementing a new educational policy?