Final reflection

Hello everyone and welcome to my final blogpost and reflection in this course. The course has included a lot of different topics and concepts such as methods, theory and philosophy which has resulted in new insights and knowledge that will think will be especially useful for the master thesis which i (hopefully) will write during the spring of 2016.

I would like to start of by talking a bit about the more philosophical part (theme 1-2) of this course which included reading from authors such as Kant, Plato, Horkheimer etc.

“Thus far it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to objects. On that presupposition, however, all our attempts to establish something about them a priori, by means of concepts through which our cognition would be expanded, have come to nothing. Let us, therefore, try to find out by experiment whether we shall not make better progress in the problems of metaphysics if we assume that objects must conform to our cognition.”

I find it really fascinating how philosophical concepts undermine much of the knowledge we gain at KTH today. What Kant is talking about is so fundamental are necessary preconditions for the kind of knowledge we gain in research and therefore interesting. Often we think that in order to gain knowledge we have to look out at the world. However, by examining how and under what cirqumstances we are looking at things, through our categories of understanding (causality, substance, unity etc) and forms of intuition (space and time) we can achieve better results. Furthermore, concepts such as nominalism has helped me think about how I have a tendency to group objects and generalise sometimes, being able to break away from social constructions is of course important. However, in research I think it’s important that there is a balance between konceptualism and empirism in order to not ignore structures of power.

I think that the philosophical part of this course was really interesting, rewarding and have resulted in many new perspectives which i probably would not have thought of otherwise.

The non-philosophical part of the course (theme 3-6) was mainly focused on theory, qualitative and quantitative methods and how to combine methods in order to conduct research such as case studies. After two weeks of abstract philosophy it was nice learn about topics and read papers that were easier to grasp. Learning what a theory is was something that changed my way of reading papers. It is sometimes still hard to realise what theories exist in papers that i read and I often overlook fundamental theories such as feminism, social capital etc. As a result it is important to remember the difference between a theory (a set of propositions/hypotheses that makes up a system of thoughts) and a hypotheses. Theories are not fixed but ever changing, something that makes future research very interesting to me.

When examining qualitative and quantitative methods I think that Olle Bälters seminar was really helpful. I learned a lot of useful advantages with qualitative and quantitative research. Advantages with qualitative research are that you get information about individuals thoughts and experiences, a whole picture answers which is useful when researching complex phenomenons. With quantitative methods you get more generic results and are useful when studying large amounts of people. Qualitative and quantitative methods both have advantages and disadvantages but often complement each other in a very good way and can be used together in order to tackle a research question from a more relevant angle. Often this is referred to as “mixed methodology” and I believe that using methods in this way often will result in more interesting and comprehensive results and allows different disciplinary boundries to be crossed. I think that the following quote is very interesting when talking about using qualitative or quantitative research methods and not using qualitative and quantitative research methods.

“…[any] kind of polarized debate has become less than productive. And, it obscures the fact that qualitative and quantitative data are intimately related to each other. All quantitative data is based on qualitative judgments; and all qualitative data can be described and manipulated numerically.”

Often a good approach to using mixed methodology is to first make use of a quantitative method, such as a survey in order to get breadth of information and get an idea of indicators within the research area. After the initial quantitative study a good idea is to examine interesting entry-points within the quantitative data with a qualitative method such as interviews in order to fully understand relationships and causality that lies behind the quantitative results. Furthermore, when trying to answer complex research questions, conducting a case study might be of relevance. A case study involves both qualitative and quantitative methods within it’s “natural frame”. Important to remember when considering a case study is that you probably will end up with more questions than answers. A case study is generates theories and hypotheses rather than confirming them. Often you might stumble upon serendipities which is in my opinion why this kind of research is very fascinating.

Often when conducting qualitative studies or case studies the word validity, whether the findings represent the current situation, are used. In order to establish the validity of research you can use a method called “triangulation” which means that you look upon a research question from multiple perspectives. There are different kinds of triangulation (data, theory, methodological etc) which all try to establish the validity in the findings. For instance, by letting people from different backgrounds (antropology, sociology, engineering, psychology etc) examine research data will result in a broader and deeper knowledge around the results and lead to higher validity. Furthermore, using different kinds of sources of information also increases the validity. This is often manifested in the use of different kind of quantitative and qualitative methods such as combinding surveys, focus groups, interviews, user-testing etc. A rule of thumb is to use data from at least two sources in order to achieve high validity.

I believe that what Haibo Li talked about at his lecture still is very important to consider, even though there are many different kinds of qualitative and quantitative research methods and forms of validation they all are dependant on what kind of research question is posed by the authors. A question can be posed from many different angles and can make the research easy or hard to conduct. Therefore I believe that we have to think one step ahead and think about our choice of question while at the same time reflecting around what methods and theories to use in order to get rich results.

Thanks!