Research Methodology Quotes

My own research methodology professor phrased this concept succinctly: learn nothing of your subjects, and you will disrupt them. Learn something of your subjects, and you will disrupt them.

I think that the thing I most want you to remember is that research is a ceremony. And so is life. Everything that we do shares in the ongoing creation of our universe.

I have therefore included in this book details of Muhammad’s life that I subjected to an extensive analytical process. In fact, cross-referencing sources and researching the historical record is insufficient without also developing expertise in the particular nuances of Muhammad’s cultural context. One cannot understand his world without appreciating the in- formation he himself was sifting through on his life journey.

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being. - Albert Einstein, 1936, responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray; quoted in: Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffmann

where actual evidence had been a bit sparse he had, in the best traditions of the keen ethnic historian, inferred from revealed self-evident wisdom* *Made it up and extrapolated from associated sources** **had read a lot of stuff that other people had made up, too.

We, as paleontologists, are used to asking questions without having all the facts.

[T]he problem of demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not a pseudo-problem of armchair philosophers: it has grave ethical and political implications.

The worse thing that contemporary qualitative research can imply is that, in this post-modern age, anything goes. The trick is to produce intelligent, disciplined work on the very edge of the abyss.

Oral traditions remain a most important way of developing trust, sharing information, strategies, advice, contacts, and ideas

... we can define concept as a logical, mental construction of one or more relationships. [...] It is purely mental, is logical, and can be described; it has been reasoned through sufficiently and presented with clarity. As such, a concept is inherently abstract (takes some things as given or assumed)

There’s no discovery without a search and there’s no rediscovery without a research. Every discovery man ever made has always been concealed. It takes searchers and researchers to unveil them, that’s what make an insightful leader.

It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.

History is also about power. In fact history is mostly about power. It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others. It is because of this relationship with power that we have been excluded, marginalized and ‘Othered’. In this sense history is not important for indigenous peoples because a thousand accounts of the ‘truth’ will not alter the ‘fact’ that indigenous peoples are still marginal and do not possess the power to transform history into justice.

Research for social justice expands and improves the conditions for justice; it is an intellectual, cognitive and moral project, often fraught, never complete, but worthwhile

People, families, organizations in marginalized communities struggle everyday; it is a way of life that is necessary for survival, and when theorized and mobilized can become a powerful strategy for transformation

the sense of a professional discipline embracing a scientific methodology, a shared vocabulary, and an agreed-upon body of findings rooted in research and practice. In that regard, Kanner’s generation was among the pioneers.

There are numerous oral stories which tell of what it means, what it feels like, to be present while your history is erased before your eyes, dismissed as irrelevant, ignored or rendered as the lunatic ravings of drunken old people

The intellectual project of decolonizing has to set out ways to proceed through a colonizing world. It needs a radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities that can only be imagined as other things fall into place. Decolonizing Methodologies is not a method for revolution in a political sense but provokes some revolutionary thinking about the roles that knowledge, knowledge production, knowledge hierarchies and knowledge institutions play in decolonization and social transformation.

I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.

Respectful, reciprocal, genuine relationships lie at the heart of the community life and community development

The challenge always is to demystify, to decolonize.

A GOOD RESEARCHER IS THE ONE WHO REDUCES THE DISTANCE BETWEEN IMAGINATION AND REALITY.

IF YOU WANT TO BE MORE POSITIVE, THINK NEGATIVE.

Nothing is right and wrong in research, research is an addiction with an endless search for its drug

Research is a two-way process, search for what you have gained and what you have to lose; what you have lost and what you have to gain

The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or other. It becomes evident that such violations are not accidental events, they are not results of insufficient knowledge or of inattention which might have been avoided. On the contrary, we see that they are necessary for progress. Indeed, one of the most striking features of recent discussions in the history and philosophy of science is the realization that events and developments, such as the invention of atomism in antiquity, the Copernican Revolution, the rise of modern atomism (kinetic theory; dispersion theory; stereochemistry; quantum theory), the gradual emergence of the wave theory of light, occurred only because some thinkers either decided not to be bound be certain 'obvious' methodological rules, or because they unwittingly broke them.

Frankly, the overwhelming majority of academics have ignored the data explosion caused by the digital age. The world’s most famous sex researchers stick with the tried and true. They ask a few hundred subjects about their desires; they don’t ask sites like PornHub for their data. The world’s most famous linguists analyze individual texts; they largely ignore the patterns revealed in billions of books. The methodologies taught to graduate students in psychology, political science, and sociology have been, for the most part, untouched by the digital revolution. The broad, mostly unexplored terrain opened by the data explosion has been left to a small number of forward-thinking professors, rebellious grad students, and hobbyists. That will change.

involving into an iterative process of simplifying the 'complexity', and then transforming this 'simplicity into newer complexity' while integrating the unsolved domain for an unprecedented success.

When we speak of this idea of “othering,” we’re not talking about something a few bad people did. There wasn’t one nefarious guy who created it and set it into being. It existed at the very heart of Empire and the colonial project; it became the founding ethos of entire academic disciplines and social science, pervading everything from research methodologies to literature to popular art. It is institutionalized and, in some ways, inescapable.

Criticism is not a Popperian quick kill, by refutation. Important criticism is always constructive: there is no refutation without a better theory. Kuhn is wrong in thinking that scientific revolutions are sudden, irrational changes in vision. The history of science refutes both Popper and Kuhn: on close inspection both Popperian crucial experiments and Kuhnian revolutions turn out to be myths: what normally happens is that progressive research programmes replace degenerating ones.

One can today easily demonstrate that there can be no valid derivation of a law of nature from any finite number of facts; but we still keep reading about scientific theories being proved from facts. Why this stubborn resistance to elementary logic?

At the heart of such a view of authenticity is a belief that indigenous cultures cannot change, cannot recreate themselves and still claim to be indigenous. Nor can they be complicated, internally diverse or contradictory. Only the West has that privilege

From the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write, and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our ‘faculties’ by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are.1 It galls us that Western researchers and intellectuals can assume to know all that it is possible to know of us, on the basis of their brief encounters with some of us. It appals us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations. It angers us when practices linked to the last century, and the centuries before that, are still employed to deny the validity of indigenous peoples’ claim to existence, to land and territories, to the right of self-determination, to the survival of our languages and forms of cultural knowledge, to our natural resources and systems for living within our environments.

The message of decolonization issuing from many writers in the field is that the process of decolonizing can be extremely ‘messy’, often leading to extreme violence; and that in a political sense it can fail miserably, replacing one corrupt elite with its mimics.

Struggle can be mobilized as resistance and as transformation. It can provide the means for working things out 'on the ground', for identifying and solving problems of practice, for identifying strengths and weaknesses, for refining tactics and uncovering deeper challenges.

The reach of imperialism into ‘our heads’ challenges those who belong to colonized communities to understand how this occurred, partly because we perceive a need to decolonize our minds, to recover ourselves, to claim a space in which to develop a sense of authentic humanity.

The belief in causality is metaphysical. It is nothing but a typical metaphysical hypostatization of a well-justified methodological rule- the scientist's decision never to abandon his search for laws. The metaphysical belief in causality seems thus more fertile in its various manifestations than any indeterminist physics metaphysics of the kind advocated by Heisenberg. Indeed, we can see that Heisenberg's comments have had a crippling effect on research. Connections which are not far to seek may easily be overlooked if its continually repeated that the search for any such connections is 'meaningless'.

What, then, is the hallmark of science? Do we have to capitulate and agree that a scientific revolution is just an irrational change in commit­ment, that it is a religious conversion? Tom Kuhn, a distinguished Amer­ican philosopher of science, arrived at this conclusion after discovering the naivety of Popper’s falsificationism. But if Kuhn is right, then there is no explicit demarcation between science and pseudoscience, no distinc­tion between scientific progress and intellectual decay, there is no objec­tive standard of honesty. But what criteria can he then offer to demarcate scientific progress from intellectual degeneration?

I decided to write Parabellum because I was personally baffled by the frequency of mass shootings in the United States. The Sandy Hook school shooting was the once that really got the wheels turning. I just couldn't understand why anyone would do such a thing, and I felt compelled to grapple with all the issues at play.

Studiando, noi diventiamo tutti filosofi; dovrete dunque avvezzarvi, ogni volta che un risultato vi sorprende, specialmente quando questo risultato vi par nuovo, dovrete avvezzarvi, dico, a chiedere a voi stessi o ad altri: «Quale è la causa di ciò? Perché le cose succedono a questo modo?» E presto o tardi finirete sempre col trovare la risposta.

For a macro cross-industry view, however, consider the robust methodology used in The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), developed by Claes Fornell in conjunction with the National Quality Research Center (NQRC), Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. ACSI measures consumer satisfaction with goods and services in the United States.

An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry — including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology—all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing.

In the course catalogue of the psychology department at my own university, the first required course in the curriculum is ‘Introduction to Statistics and Methodology in Psychological Research’. Second-year psychology students must take ‘Statistical Methods in Psychological Research’. Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad would have been bewildered if you’d told them that in order to understand the human mind and cure its illnesses you must first study statistics.

Krieger took the first scientific step by partnering with physician Stephen Sidney to specifically measure research participants’ exposure to racial discrimination and test its association with high blood pressure. Instead of treating race as a biological risk factor, as was typical in epidemiological research, Krieger zoomed in on racism as a cause of disease and developed a fledgling methodology to measure its health impact directly. Her findings, published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1996, were the first to show that experiencing racial discrimination raises the risk of high blood pressure.

[…] a student in our class asked disdainfully why quantitative methodologists do not openly criticize qualitative methods. He scoffed, 'They don't even mention it. But in courses in qualitative methods, quantitative methods always come up.' […] I pointed out that the lack of critical remarks and the absence of any mention of qualitative research in 'methods' courses indicate the hegemony of the quantitative approach. Were not his statistics professors making a strong statement about the place of qualitative methods by omitting them entirely? Qualitative researchers, then, have to legitimate their perspective to students in order to break the methodological silence coming from the other side.

They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts. NOTES ON METHODOLOGY I began this work because of what I saw as incomplete perceptions, outside of scholarly circles, of what the Great Migration was and how and why it happened, particularly through the eyes of those who experienced it. Because it was so unwieldy and lasted for so long, the movement did not appear to rise to the level of public consciousness that, by any measure, it seemed to deserve. The first question, in my view, had to do with its time frame: what was it, and when precisely did it occur? The Great Migration is often described as a jobs-driven, World War I movement, despite decades of demographic evidence and real-world indicators that it not only continued well into the 1960s but gathered steam with each decade, not ending until the social, political, and economic reasons for the Migration began truly to be addressed in the South in the dragged-out, belated response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The second question had to do with where it occurred. The migration from Mississippi to Chicago has been the subject of the most research through the years and has dominated discussion of the phenomenon, in part because of the sheer size of the black influx there and because of the great scholarly interest taken in it by a cadre of social scientists working in Chicago at the start of the Migration. However, from my years as a national correspondent at The New York Times and my early

Entrepreneurship itself is an emergent system, where companies create the conditions for experimentation and learning to occur, often symbiotically with customers. In 1978, Eric von Hippel (my PhD advisor at MIT) pioneered the notion of user-driven innovation.10, 11 Back then, the conventional wisdom was that innovation only came from corporate, government, and university research-and-development labs. While some still believe this today, Eric's insight proved to be prescient in many areas, especially in the information age, as the widespread adoption of open-source software and Lean Startup methodologies have demonstrated.12 Twitter is a tangible example since three of the platform's most popular features—the @ reply, the # hashtag indexing, and retweet sharing—were all generated bottom-up by users.

When experimentation is complete, researchers are expected to document and share their data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists. This allows other researchers the chance to verify results by attempting to reproduce them and allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established. This is called “full disclosure” and is an area that the paranormal field is lacking in. Currently there is no repository of paranormal data or body of evidence that researchers can turn to for comparing data. Television shows and websites that document paranormal activity are really our only outlet. The drawback to not having a database is that researchers cannot identify patterns of activity and therefore can’t derive theories or explanations of the paranormal.

To sum up. The hallmark of empirical progress is not trivial verifi­cations: Popper is right that there are millions of them. It is no success for Newtonian theory that stones, when dropped, fall towards the earth, no matter how often this is repeated. But so-called ‘refutations’ are not the hallmark of empirical failure, as Popper has preached, since all pro­grammes grow in a permanent ocean of anomalies. What really count are dramatic, unexpected, stunning predictions: a few of them are enough to tilt the balance; where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes. Now, how do scientific revolutions come about? If we have two rival research programmes, and one is progressing while tire other is degenerating, scientists tend to join the progressive programme. This is the rationale of scientific revolutions.

From 1992 to 1997, TAT [Treating Abuse Today] under my editorship published several articles by a number of respected professionals who seriously questioned the false memory syndrome (FMS) hypothesis and the methodology, ethics, and assertions of those who were rapidly pushing the concept into the public consciousness. During that time, not one person from the FMS movement contacted me to refute the specific points made in the articles or to present any research that would prove even a single case of this allegedly “epidemic” syndrome. Instead of a reasoned response to the published articles, for nearly three years proponents of the so-called FMS hypothesis–including members, officials, and supporters of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, Inc. (FMSF)–have waged a campaign of harassment, defamation, and psychological terrorism against me, my clients, staff, family, and other innocent people connected with me. These clearly are intended to (a) intimidate me and anyone associated with me; (b) terrorize and deter access to my psychotherapy clients; (c) encumber my resources; and (d) destroy my reputation publicly, in the business community, among my professional colleagues, and within national and international professional organizations. Before describing this highly orchestrated campaign, let me emphasize that I have never treated any member of this group or their families, and do not have any relationships to any of my counseling clients. Neither have I consulted to their cases nor do I bear any relation to the disclosures of memories of sexual abuse in their families. I had no prior dealings with any of this group before they began showing up at my offices with offensive and defamatory signs early in 1995. Ethics and Behavior, 8(2) pp. 161-187

Perhaps it is unfair to expect such a high degree of scientific precision. But studies that conclude health disparities are caused by genetic difference do not even come close. These studies typically control for the socio-economic status (SES) of the research subjects in an attempt to compare subjects of different races who have the same SES. If there remains a difference in the prevalence or outcome of a disease, the researchers typically attribute the unexplained variation to genetic distinctions between racial groups. But this conclusion suffers from a basic methodological error. The researchers failed to account for many other unmeasured factors, such as the experience of racial discrimination or differences in wealth, not just income, that are related to health outcomes and differ by race. Any one of these unmeasured factors—and not genes—might explain why health outcomes vary by race.

for instance, the theories and practices of art and photography with anthropological theory and practice (e.g. Edwards 1997a; da Silva and Pink 2004; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2004; Schneider and Wright 2005). The interdisciplinary focus in visual methods has also been represented in Theo van Leeuwen and Carey Jewitt’s Handbook of Social Research (2000) and Chris Pole’s Seeing is Believing (2004) both of which combine case studies in visual research from across disciplines. The idea that visual research as a field of interdisciplinary practice is also central to Advances in Visual Methodology (Pink 2012a) and is demonstrated by the work of the volume’s contributors, as well as by the recent SAGE Handbook of Visual Research Methods (Margolis and Pauwels 2011). Likewise the interdisciplinary journal Visual Studies (formerly Visual Sociology) provides an excellent series of examples of visual research, practice, theory and methodology.

We are living in a golden age of genetic research, with new technologies permitting the easy collection of genetic data from millions upon millions of people and the rapid development of new statistical methodologies for analyzing it. But it is not enough to just produce new genetic knowledge. As this research leaves the ivory tower and disseminates through the public, it is essential for scientists and the public to grapple with what this research means about human identity and equality. Far too often, however, this essential task of meaning-making is being abdicated to the most extreme and hate-filled voices. As Eric Turkheimer, Dick Nisbett, and I warned: If people with progressive political values, who reject claims of genetic determinism and pseudoscientific racialist speculation, abdicate their responsibility to engage with the science of human abilities and the genetics of human behavior, the field will come to be dominated by those who do not share those values.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

Although these digital tools can improve the diagnostic process and offer clinicians a variety of state-of-the-art treatment options, most are based on a reductionist approach to health and disease. This paradigm takes a divide-and-conquer approach to medicine, "rooted in the assumption that complex problems are solvable by dividing them into smaller, simpler, and thus more tractable units." Although this methodology has led to important insights and practical implications in healthcare, it does have its limitations. Reductionist thinking has led researchers and clinicians to search for one or two primary causes of each disease and design therapies that address those causes.... The limitation of this type of reasoning becomes obvious when one examines the impact of each of these diseases. There are many individuals who are exposed to HIV who do not develop the infection, many patients have blood glucose levels outside the normal range who never develop signs and symptoms of diabetes, and many patients with low thyroxine levels do not develop clinical hypothyroidism. These "anomalies" imply that there are cofactors involved in all these conditions, which when combined with the primary cause or causes bring about the clinical onset. Detecting these contributing factors requires the reductionist approach to be complemented by a systems biology approach, which assumes there are many interacting causes to each disease.

In the last few years I have been advocating a methodology of scientific research programmes, which solves some of the problems which both Popper and Kuhn failed to solve. First, I claim that the typical descriptive unit of great scientific achievements is not an isolated hypothesis but rather a research programme. Science is not simply trial and error, a series of conjectures and refutations. ‘All swans are white’ may be falsified by the discovery of one black swan. But such trivial trial and error does not rank as science. Newtonian science, for instance, is not simply a set of four conjectures—the three laws of mechanics and the law of gravitation. These four laws constitute only the ‘hard core’ of the Newtonian programme. But this hard core is tenaciously protected from refutation by a vast ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses. And, even more importantly, the research programme also has a ‘heuristic’, that is, a powerful problem-solving machinery, which, with the help of sophisticated mathematical techniques, digests anomalies and even turns them into positive evidence. For instance, if a planet does not move exactly as it should, the Newtonian scientist checks his conjectures concerning atmospheric refraction, concerning propaga­tion of light in magnetic storms, and hundreds of other conjectures which are all part of the programme. He may even invent a hitherto unknown planet and calculate its position, mass and velocity in order to explain the anomaly.

Ultimately, the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world, is the largest historical database available concerning the evolution of income inequality; it is the primary source of data for this book.24 The book’s second most important source of data, on which I will actually draw first, concerns wealth, including both the distribution of wealth and its relation to income. Wealth also generates income and is therefore important on the income study side of things as well. Indeed, income consists of two components: income from labor (wages, salaries, bonuses, earnings from nonwage labor, and other remuneration statutorily classified as labor related) and income from capital (rent, dividends, interest, profits, capital gains, royalties, and other income derived from the mere fact of owning capital in the form of land, real estate, financial instruments, industrial equipment, etc., again regardless of its precise legal classification). The WTID contains a great deal of information about the evolution of income from capital over the course of the twentieth century. It is nevertheless essential to complete this information by looking at sources directly concerned with wealth. Here I rely on three distinct types of historical data and methodology, each of which is complementary to the others.25 In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.26 This

In Uganda, I wrote a questionaire that I had my research assistants give; on it, I asked about the embalasassa, a speckled lizard said to be poisonous and to have been sent by Prime minsister Milton Obote to kill Baganda in the late 1960s. It is not poisonous and was no more common in the 1960s than it had been in previous decades, as Makerere University science professors announced on the radio and stated in print… I wrote the question, What is the difference between basimamoto and embalasassa? Anyone who knows anything about the Bantu language—myself included—would know the answer was contained in the question: humans and reptiles are different living things and belong to different noun classes… A few of my informants corrected my ignorance… but many, many more ignored the translation in my question and moved beyond it to address the history of the constructs of firemen and poisonous lizards without the slightest hesitation. They disregarded language to engage in a discussion of events… My point is not about the truth of the embalasassa story… but rather that the labeling of one thing as ‘true’ and the other as ‘fictive’ or ‘metaphorical’—all the usual polite academic terms for false—may eclipse all the intricate ways in which people use social truths to talk about the past. Moreover, chronological contradictions may foreground the fuzziness of certain ideas and policies, and that fuzziness may be more accurate than any exact historical reconstruction… Whether the story of the poisionous embalasassa was real was hardly the issue; there was a real, harmless lizard and there was a real time when people in and around Kampala feared the embalasassa. They feared it in part because of beliefs about lizards, but mainly what frightened people was their fear of their government and the lengths to which it would go to harm them. The confusions and the misunderstandings show what is important; knowledge about the actual lizard would not.

In 1942, Merton set out four scientific values, now known as the ‘Mertonian Norms’. None of them have snappy names, but all of them are good aspirations for scientists. First, universalism: scientific knowledge is scientific knowledge, no matter who comes up with it – so long as their methods for finding that knowledge are sound. The race, sex, age, gender, sexuality, income, social background, nationality, popularity, or any other status of a scientist should have no bearing on how their factual claims are assessed. You also can’t judge someone’s research based on what a pleasant or unpleasant person they are – which should come as a relief for some of my more disagreeable colleagues. Second, and relatedly, disinterestedness: scientists aren’t in it for the money, for political or ideological reasons, or to enhance their own ego or reputation (or the reputation of their university, country, or anything else). They’re in it to advance our understanding of the universe by discovering things and making things – full stop.20 As Charles Darwin once wrote, a scientist ‘ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.’ The next two norms remind us of the social nature of science. The third is communality: scientists should share knowledge with each other. This principle underlies the whole idea of publishing your results in a journal for others to see – we’re all in this together; we have to know the details of other scientists’ work so that we can assess and build on it. Lastly, there’s organised scepticism: nothing is sacred, and a scientific claim should never be accepted at face value. We should suspend judgement on any given finding until we’ve properly checked all the data and methodology. The most obvious embodiment of the norm of organised scepticism is peer review itself. 20. Robert K. Merton, ‘The Normative Structure of Science’ (1942), The Sociology of Science: Empirical and Theoretical Investigations (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1973): pp. 267–278.

Above all, we should not let ourselves forget precisely what method is and what it is not. A method, at least in the sciences, is a systematic set of limitations and constraints voluntarily assumed by a researcher in order to concentrate his or her investigations upon a strictly defined aspect of or approach to a clearly delineated object. As such, it allows one to see further and more perspicuously in one particular instance and in one particular way, but only because one has first consented to confine oneself to a narrow portion of the visible spectrum, so to speak. Moreover, while a given method may grant one a glimpse of truths that would remain otherwise obscure, that method is not itself a truth. This is crucial to understand. A method, considered in itself, may even in some ultimate sense be “false” as an explanation of things and yet still be probative as an instrument of investigation; some things are more easily seen through a red filter, but to go through life wearing rose-colored spectacles is not to see things as they truly are. When one forgets the distinction between method and truth, one becomes foolishly prone to respond to any question that cannot be answered from the vantage of one’s particular methodological perch by dismissing it as nonsensical, or by issuing a promissory note guaranteeing a solution to the problem at some juncture in the remote future, or by simply distorting the question into one that looks like the kind one really can answer after all. Whenever modern scientific method is corrupted in this fashion the results are especially unfortunate. In such cases, an admirably severe discipline of interpretive and theoretical restraint has been transformed into its perfect and irrepressibly wanton opposite: what began as a principled refusal of metaphysical speculation, for the sake of specific empirical inquiries, has now been mistaken for a comprehensive knowledge of the metaphysical shape of reality; the art of humble questioning has been mistaken for the sure possession of ultimate conclusions.

We begin by exploring how peak performance is related to the notion of peak experience, both at the individual and group level. Following an explanation of our research methodology, we present the observation data from our study interpolated with our analyses. Based on these analyses, we propose a model of collective virtuosity in organizations and conclude by explaining limitations of our research and offering directions for further research.

The research I present in this book moves within a complex position: palpable tensions exist alongside exciting possibilities. CBPR methodologies emerged from critiques of conventional researcher-driven approaches and from scholarship and activism that names and problemitizes the power imbalances in current practices. CBPR strives to conduct research based in communities and founded upon core community values. With these broader critiques in mind, I wanted to consider how archaeology might be practiced if the concepts of decolonization and postcolonial theory were applied to the discipline. How might archaeological research change to create a reciprocal practice that truly benefits communities, at least as much as it benefits the scholarly interests of archaeologists?

Similarly, some of the more recent research on serial killers and child abuse demonstrates an analogous attention to definition and methodological precision. This is a highly positive development given the fact that child abuse has been cited as a developmental precursor to antisocial impulses and that these same impulses have been suggested to be precursors to both animal abuse and violence directed against humans.

Even if we grant that digital natives think and learn somewhat differently than older generations, we may be doing them a disservice to de-emphasize 'legacy' content such as reading, writing, and logical thinking, or to say that the methodologies we have used in the past are no longer relevant... Digital immigrants and natives alike are bombarded with vast volumes of information in today's electronic society, which... calls for an even greater emphasis on critical thinking and research skills -- the very sort of 'legacy' content that teachers have focused on since classical times

Dr. Luskin lifts forgiveness out of the purely psychological and religious domains and anchors it in science, medicine, and health. This book is vitally needed.” —Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Healing Words “Simply the best book on the subject, adding sophistication and depth to our instinctive but sometimes uncertain understanding of how forgiveness heals both those forgiven and those who forgive. Luskin’s research also shows how modern psychology can enrich traditional moral teachings. His book will stand as a modern classic in psychology.” —Michael Murphy, cofounder of the Esalen Institute and author of Future of the Body “Combining groundbreaking research with a proven methodology, Forgive for Good is an accessible and practical guide to learning the power of forgiveness.” —John Gray, Ph.D., author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus “Straightforward, sincere, and essential.” —Dave Pelzer, author of A Child Called It and Help Yourself “A rare and marvelous book—warm, loving, solidly researched, and wise. It could change your life.” —George Leonard, author of Mastery and president of the Esalen Institute “Dr. Luskin’s wise and clinically astute methods for finding forgiveness could not be more timely … a sure-handed guide through the painful emotions of hurt, sadness and anger towards a resolution that makes peace with the past, soothes the present, and liberates the future.

I discovered,” said Harry through gritted teeth, “that when it comes to doing truly basic research on a genuinely confusing problem where you have no clue what’s going on, my books on scientific methodology aren’t worth crap -” “Language, Mr. Potter! Some of us are innocent young girls!” “Fine. But if my books were worth a carp, that’s a kind of fish not anything bad, they would have given me the following important piece of advice: When there’s a confusing problem and you’re just starting out and you have a falsifiable hypothesis, go test it. Find some simple, easy way of doing a basic check and do it right away. Don’t worry about designing an elaborate course of experiments that would make a grant proposal look impressive to a funding agency. Just check as fast as possible whether your ideas are false before you start investing huge amounts of effort in them. How does that sound for a moral?

The imperial imagination enabled European nations to imagine the possibility that new worlds, new wealth and new possessions existed that could be discovered and controlled.

Imperialism was the system of control which secured the markets and capital investments. Colonialism facilitated this expansion by ensuring that there was European control, which necessarily meant securing and subjugating the indigenous populations.

MacKenzie defines imperialism as being ‘more than a set of economic, political and military phenomena. It is also a complex ideology which had widespread cultural, intellectual and technical expressions.’8

Globalization and conceptions of a new world order represent different sorts of challenges for indigenous peoples. While being on the margins of the world has had dire consequences, being incorporated within the world’s marketplace has different implications and in turn requires the mounting of new forms of resistance.

Imperialism provided the means through which concepts of what counts as human could be applied systematically as forms of classification, for example through hierarchies of race and typologies of different societies. In conjunction with imperial power and with ‘science’, these classification systems came to shape relations between imperial powers and indigenous societies.

Levin and Duckworth are two of the cofounders of Character Lab, which uses Duckworth’s experimental work at the Upper Darby School District near the University of Pennsylvania to fine-tune the character performance interventions that Levin initiated at KIPP schools in the early 2000s. Interestingly, much of the research that is used to justify the use of the Seligman-Duckworth resiliency improvement methodology is the same data offered to justify the Seligman deal that cost the U.S. Army $145 million (see chapter 1) for interventions that brought no benefit to GIs suffering from the stresses of war. We may wonder how much these alleged remedies for children might cost federal and state education departments, whose bankrolls are much smaller than those at the Pentagon.

When researchers explain the methodology of how they performed their research, there is often a portion that describes the preparation of the lab animals. This section explains that standardized such-and-such breed animals (such as Wistar rats) were “put on a Western diet until their cholesterol and inflammation were sufficiently elevated to carry out the research protocol.” What this means is that the Western diet is used to produce specific disease conditions in the lab animals, so that the researchers can carry out their research on different drug effects. Isn't it a bit ironic that poor diet is used to produce disease for drug testing, and yet doctors do not really push good diet as a way of preventing or treating illness?

All of these models and others have been heavily criticized. In 2009, a panel commissioned by the Association for Psychological Sciences published a report that outlined a research design to properly study the effect of learning styles, and it asserted that this methodology was almost entirely absent from learning styles studies. Of the few studies utilizing this research design, all but one feature negative findings. They also doubted the value of the significant cost of attempting to identify the precise learning style of every student over other interventions such as individual tutors. They concluded that “at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number.” Then,

absolute usefulness to those who wielded it as an instrument. It told us things already known, suggested things that would not work, and made careers for people who already had jobs. ‘We

Although I was interested in developing new ways to measure software quality, I acknowledged that it was only a fuzzy dream with no grounding in formal research methodologies that the academic community would deem acceptable.

The basic conflict-resolving methodology was field-developed during a period of thirty years working in eight diverse cultures of the world. Its guiding principles were double-checked through research in twelve additional cultures. (Actually, the program was developed initially to put out fires in cross-cultural relations between overseas Americans and their foreign host-nationals in key hot spots of the world.)

As society becomes ever more mediated, reliant on and reconfigured by complex and fast-changing digital technologies, academic analysis is urgently in need of fresh thinking. Look no further: this volume offers a wealth of insightful concepts, critical questions and intellectual traditions to revitalise our field. Through a rigorous historical grounding, it simultaneously integrates and yet distinguishes among key approaches to pose a new research agenda for the digital world.—Sonia Livingstone, London School of Economics and Political Science

In his summary of mixed methods, Bryman (2006) outlines five methodological reasons for mixing methods:  1. Complementarity: deepen or enhance other data 2. Expansion: expanding the inquiry to ask different questions 3. Development: use one method to inform and improve the other 4. Triangulation: corroboration of earlier data 5. Initiation: resolving earlier contradictory findings

All forms of complex causation, and especially nonlinear transformations, admittedly stack the deck against prediction. Linear describes an outcome produced by one or more variables where the effect is additive. Any other interaction is nonlinear. This would include outcomes that involve step functions or phase transitions. The hard sciences routinely describe nonlinear phenomena. Making predictions about them becomes increasingly problematic when multiple variables are involved that have complex interactions. Some simple nonlinear systems can quickly become unpredictable when small variations in their inputs are introduced.23 As so much of the social world is nonlinear, fifty plus years of behavioral research and theory building have not led to any noticeable improvement in our ability to predict events. This is most evident in the case of transformative events like the social-political revolution of the 1960s, the end of the Cold War, and the rise and growing political influence of fundamentalist religious groups. Radical skepticism about prediction of any but the most short-term outcomes is fully warranted. This does not mean that we can throw our hands up in the face of uncertainty, contingency, and unpredictability. In a complex society, individuals, organizations, and states require a high degree of confidence—even if it is misplaced—in the short-term future and a reasonable degree of confidence about the longer term. In its absence they could not commit themselves to decisions, investments, and policies. Like nudging the frame of a pinball machine to influence the path of the ball, we cope with the dilemma of uncertainty by doing what we can to make our expectations of the future self-fulfilling. We seek to control the social and physical worlds not only to make them more predictable but to reduce the likelihood of disruptive and damaging shocks (e.g., floods, epidemics, stock market crashes, foreign attacks). Our fallback strategy is denial.

But though proponents refer to IAT research as “science”—or, in Kang’s words, “remarkable,” “jaw-dropping” science—their claims about its social significance leapfrogged ahead of scientific validation. There is hardly an aspect of IAT doctrine that is not now under methodological challenge. Any social-psychological instrument must pass two tests to be considered accurate: reliability and validity.

There was a method, a toilsome, age-old plan for systematic research, a kind of combined steamroller and fine-toothed comb which (in theory) nothing could escape...

To formulate a ‘good’ research problem, in my opinion, you need to know how to review the literature,

it does not have its own body of methods and procedures

To me, a ‘mixed methods approach’ is a philosophy rather than an approach

This is a problem in the research method of Orientalists — they often refer to the wrong sources on a subject and consequently come to the wrong conclusions. It is not applicable to refer to works of tafsir in order to research the history of Hadith. Tabari’s tafsir is not a place to find anything on the science of Hadith. His style is to mention a verse, list all the narrations about its interpretation and then give one interpretation more weight over the other.

Mixed methods research is a research design with philosophical assumptions as well as methods of inquiry. As a methodology, it involves philosophical assumptions that guide the direction of the collection and analysis of data and the mixture of qualitative and quantitative approaches in many phases of the research process (J. W. Cresswell & Plano Clark, 2007, p. 5).

My 2005 review of the literature, which summarized studies with varied methodologies, indicates that the association between genius and mental illness has considerable strength. Very creative writers tend to obtain higher scores on the psychopathology-related parts of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality tough-minded. Last, highly eminent scientists tend to score higher on sections of the Cattell 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire that signify they are withdrawn, solemn, internally preoccupied, precise and critical. All told, top performers are not a very normal bunch. Psychiatric studies bolster these results. The rate and intensity of certain psychopathologic symptoms, such as depression and alcoholism, are noticeably higher in very creative individuals than in the general population. Research also suggests that these divergent thinkers are more likely to come from family lines that are at higher risk for psychopathology.

A lack of methodology in Upper Palaeolithic art research has led to confusion of priorities.

The theme of his life’s work was his effort to bridge this gap. The way to do it was simply to refuse to see anything in isolation. Everything, as he saw it, existed within a context, outside of which it was unintelligible. Moreover, every problem existed within a context, outside of which it was unsolvable. Agriculture, thus, cannot be understood or its problems solved without respect to context. The same applied even to an individual plant or crop. And this respect for context properly set the standard and determined the methodology of agricultural science: The basis of research was obviously to be investigation directed to the whole existence of a selected crop, namely, “the plant itself in relation to the soil in which it grows, to the conditions of village agriculture under which it is cultivated, and with reference to the economic uses of the product”; in other words research was to be integral, never fragmented. 11 If nothing exists in isolation, then all problems are circumstantial; no problem resides, or can be solved, in anybody’s department. A disease was, thus, a symptom of a larger disorder.

Most of the recent literature on creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, 2000; Gruber & Wallace, 2000; Sternberg & Lubart, 1996) suggests that creativity is the result of a confluence of one or more of the factors from these six aforementioned categories. The “confluence” approach to the study of creativity has gained credibility, and the research literature has numerous confluence theories for better understanding the process of creativity. A review of the most commonly cited confluence theories of creativity and a description of the methodology employed for data collection and data analysis in this study follow.

educators of English learners should be well-versed in theories of second language acquisition and in methodologies such as sheltering and scaffolding. Their work should be informed by professional development and coaching from experienced colleagues on effective techniques in the classroom. But is there no room for diversity in teaching styles and techniques? Is there really just one way to shelter instruction?

An even stronger study on aging and the Transcendental Meditation program, performed with greater methodological precision, was conducted by researchers at Harvard and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1989. This study analyzed elderly people who were introduced to the Transcendental Meditation program. In a short time they showed numerous beneficial changes, and ultimately lived longer, on average, than patients in a control group that did not practice the Transcendental Meditation program. The positive results were noted to endure when a follow-up study was conducted more than ten years later.

The trajectory of this tradition, from positivism to the current variety of postpositivist philosophies of science, has reflected the pressure of a complex reality upon conceptions too restricted to give an adequate account of it. The successive modifications of the tradition over the years, from verificationism to falsification, to the historicism of paradigm shifts, to the methodology of scientific research programs, to methodological dadaism, have been impressive but still inadequate attempts to come to terms with the metaphysical and historical dimensions of science.

The review of studies of seasonal patterns for peak months of occurrence for episodes of mania and depression indicates that there is a consistency of findings despite the methodological problems intrinsic to such research.

An example of a congressive version is the "registered reports" format for publishing research. Unlike the ingressive system, where dramatic positive results are favored, in this congressive system peer review is conducted on the research question and the methodology before the data are collected. Thus it is the process that is reviewed, not the answer. The idea is that if the question is interesting and the methodology is sound, then the result of the experiment is interesting whether it turns out to be positive or negative.

Several requirements typify positivist methodological approaches. First, research methods generally require a distancing of the researcher from her of his “object” of study by defining the researcher as a “subject” with full human subjectivity and by objectifying the “object” of study. A second requirement is the absence of emotions from the research process. Third, ethics and values are deemed inappropriate in the research process, either as the reason for scientific inquiry or as part of the research process itself. Finally, adversarial debates, whether written or oral, become the preferred method of ascertaining truth: The arguments that can withstand the greatest assault and survive intact become the strongest truths. Such criteria ask African-American women to objectify ourselves, devalue our emotional life, displace our motivations for furthering knowledge about Black women, and confront in an adversarial relationship those with more social, economic, and professional power.

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Recently, computational social science has set out to advance social research by using the ever-growing computer processing power, methodological innovations, and the emergence of vast quantities of data in the digital age to achieve better knowledge about social phenomena.

The Muslims, influenced by their original pastoral and herding way of life, showed little interest in the practical application of their theoretical advances. They believed there was nothing to learn from European methodological research and practical scientific successes. In consequence, their society, which had excelled in establishing many of the basic theoretical principles, was left more and more behind.