Exploding the research question

I have written about the idea of pulling apart the research question before (see here ), but it is really important to ensure that all key c...

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How to begin...?

Azariadis (2011, p. 6) It can be hard to begin to tease out what we want to say when writing up a research idea. Recently I sent a stud...

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Methodology and methods alignment

When it comes to making decisions about our research methodology (big picture stuff on how we want to go about finding the answer to our res...

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An academic research metaphor

Have you ever thought about the metaphors used to describe academic research? I ran across a great one last year which I have been consideri...

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The emic and etic debate

I have written about this pair of research approaches before ( here ), but felt that there might be a bit more to say.  These terms relate t...

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Emic and etic approaches to research

Many of us in the career field are drawn to the relational side of research, which tends to use the more qualitative approaches. However, we...

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Mapping the research question

I have written about this before (see here ), but it is really important to ensure that all key components of a research question feeds into...

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The ologies

The field of epistemology - research philosophy - is broad and technical. Epistemologies/philosophies can be divided into the following four...

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A hierarchy for methodological choices

There is a hierarchy for putting together our research recipe of methodology and methods when we are proposing a new research project. First...

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Research proposal alignment

One thing that I find many research students struggle to get their heads around is that all the elements of the research proposal for their ...

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Research project skills

Ah: the things we don't know until we see how someone else has presented them! I have been reading Machin et al's (2019) book, ...

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What is a problem statement?

In research, a 'problem statement' is a brief outline of what our research is setting out to solve, or to provide direction on. It...

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Research Design: qualitative versus quantitative

Our research design is the spirit in which we will make our decisions about the type of data we will collect. It needs to fit with our res...

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How Research Components Fit Together

When we prepare our methodology, we have to work from the big picture down to the detail. There are four layers to this, which I am goin...

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