Research and Regrouping

I've decided to spend the next week or so regrouping before starting my research. I need to go through all of my book work to remind myself of why I'm here and how I'm supposed to go about answering my research questions. I think that little bit of preparation will be more useful than just jumping in to interviews.

Data collection--interviews, surveys, focus groups, participant observation--is actually just a very small part of research. In fact, if that is the only part you do, you research probably won't be that useful. I need three things before I start collecting data.

1. Justification. I need a good reason for being here in the first place. I've written a little about this on the web pages attached to this blog. When it comes down to it, I'm not really doing my research on Kyrgyzstan. I'm doing research to figure out whether or not cultural differences can be studied over large geographical and political areas (cultural differences have traditionally been studied in very small contexts, like villages). Kyrgyzstan just happened to be a good place to do that. I need to show exactly why it is a good place.

2. Theory. If I just interview a lot of people, then I'm no different from a journalist. Any science is built on a body of theory about what the important parts of the world are, and how those parts interact. This is usually built on previous research, with a healthy dose of imagination thrown in. I need to show that what I am studying is valid: that the different things I am going to be asking people about and the way those things relate to one another are grounded in good sound logic and don't contradict the empirical evidence we already have.

3. Methods for the Methods. If I just interview some people, then interview some groups of people, then observe some people doing stuff, then, again, I'm just doing journalism. I need to know how I am going to put those methods together to answer the questions from my justification. I need to put them together in a way that corresponds to my theories. That's what makes methods useful.

By the way, I have nothing against journalism. In fact, I use a lot of journalists' accounts in my research. And heaven knows journalism is more interesting to read than most scientific accounts. But journalism doesn't prove anything--it just describes. Science proves--it gives generalizations that you can use to predict what people will do. If I want a good read, I turn to journalism. If I have to make a decision that will actually affect people's lives, I turn to science.