Richard Kool is a Professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability at Royal Roads University, Victoria BC Canada (rick.kool@royalroads.ca).

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them (Aristotle, 1994/250 BCE, para. 2).

Rationale

While I have no authority to cite other than my own experience, I’ll make the claim that we tend to carry some anxiety about stepping into new experiences, ones which we might feel we are unprepared for. That is, in my experience, what a great number of masters’ students feel when they step into their thesis research; they are nervous and aware of their own inadequacy.

When I conceptualized the sole research methods course for Royal Roads University’s (RRU) new (in 2003) Master of Arts (MA) program in Environmental Education and Communications (EEC), I was concerned that my course not be a course about research methods, but instead be a course that allowed the students to do research using a variety of methods.

While a survey of research methods could have been one way to organize the course, I chose to take a different tack, approaching the course from the perspective of doing research rather than studying research methods. I felt that our students, most of whom are returning to school years after they completed their undergraduate programs, might be somewhat anxious as they enter their thesis research; for the most part, they as new grad students would never have done an original research project. My hope was that if we could present an anxiety-inducing experience in the research methods course and then try to ensure that everyone got through that to an experiential understanding of what research involves, they would then be more emotionally equipped to go into the uncertainty of carrying out their own thesis research. They would know they had lived through the anxiety-inducing experiences of their in-class research project and had come out the other side, relatively intact.

My goal in the course was to offer many (if not all) of the pieces of what it takes to do a research project in the context of both qualitative (QUAL) and quantitative (QUAN) paradigms, without getting too bogged down in particular research methods or philosophical investigations of theory. My assumption was that the research method a student would use in their own thesis would be sorted out between student and thesis committee, and the student would have to commit to learning about their particular method as part of the work of developing a proposal. My goal was simply to give them an experience of dipping their toes into the two different approaches to research.

I tried to see the research methods course as a meaningful initiation (Peters, 1964) into all the aspects of doing a master’s thesis, including preparing an ethics review, deciding on research approaches to pre-constructed research questions, then doing the two small research projects (QUAN and QUAL), and most of all, living with the uncertainty that is the hallmark of asking original questions. Of course, what was missing in this was having the student develop their own research question. While time would not allow this in a 10-week course, I knew they would shortly afterwards be creating that question for their own research project.

Overview

The first part of the course was a relatively straightforward assignment which asked the students to compare and contrast attributes of the two dominant paradigms. After a few years, I added a mixed methods paper (Sosu et al., 2008), one which demonstrated a very nice integration of both QUAL and QUAN data to the theme of my program. Reading a good (and relatively straightforward) QUAN (e.g., Vaughan et al., 2003) and an engaging QUAL (e.g., Kovan & Dirkx, 2003) article within the EEC domain, students carried out a comparison of attributes like:

• what kinds of questions they were asking;
• what were the methods used to answer the questions;
• what was the nature of the sample or population studied; and
• what were the ways that answers were justified, and how was reliability and validity demonstrated.

For students with science backgrounds, my first serious problem was finding a way to convince them that QUAL approaches were a legitimate way of doing research and they shouldn’t simply discount this methodology out of hand. I also wanted our non-science students to see that QUAN research was not an impossibility, and even though they might believe that “I don’t like numbers,” (no one was asking them to physically do the math; the computer does the calculations) but they did have to be able to choose a meaningful statistical test and then interpret the findings.

Another anxiety-inducing part of the research process is that of creating an ethical review for a Research Ethics Board, and so I wanted to include the creation of this review as part of my course. All students had to go through the online tutorial that introduces the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Human Subjects. Following the tutorial, the students worked in teams to complete the RRU Research Ethics Board’s Request for Ethical Review for Research Involving Humans. To keep things interesting, I assigned them Stanley Milgram’s famous and controversial study of human obedience (Milgram, 1974) as the basis for their review, having to complete the REB document as if they were Milgram trying to get approval to do his study. This was a challenging exercise and gave opportunity for both discussion about the creation of an ethical review, and the ethics of research broadly-writ.

The last and longest part of the course involved carrying out two projects: a team project using QUAN methods, and an individual one using QUAL methods. At times, the projects were connected as the interviewee in the QUAL might have been a person surveyed in the QUAN project. In all cases, the students had to generate data and then work to make sense out of it. Given the time limitations, it wasn’t realistic for the students to go through the full process of developing a research question and then designing the study; but collecting data and carrying out an analysis seemed to be enough to give the students a feel for the aspects that, I expected, carry the greatest worry for them.

Using information in the textbooks adopted over the years (Cohen et al., 2007; Leedy & Ormrod, 2013; Robson, 2011), augmented by Trochim’s (2022) Research Methods Knowledge Base website and my own materials, I tried to ensure that the students had enough basic information to be able to use tools like VassarStats (Lowry, 2021) to do basic QUAN analyses. Projects would have students compare data using relatively simple statistical tools such as the t-test or Mann-Whitney U, or look at relationships between data using Pearson’s r or Spearman’s rs . Nothing complicated was needed to carry out the QUAN study, which most often involved the utilization of an existing survey instrument that was easy to adapt for our purposes. When the course was being run online, the students distributed surveys to contacts, and later used online survey tools to collect data; when it was done face to face, we engaged in projects at the Royal BC Museum that involved observational data collection and some survey data.

The QUAL study involved the student carrying out a single in-depth interview. While the topics regularly changed, the students were given a general theme or research area that they could work with. The point was for them to have the opportunity to experience carrying out a research interview, transcribing the interview, and then looking for themes in the transcribed data. We used a variety of approaches, including introducing students to the approach developed by Wengraf (2007).

Reflections

As noted, I could have designed a course that presented a theory-based approach to learning about research, and which might have given students a chance to be exposed to a far larger range of approaches than I offered. However, I chose to provide the students with a set of problems which, I hoped, would lead to enriching experiences. For example, I didn’t just talk about research ethics but had students create a challenging request for ethical review.  Rather than reviewing the mathematical aspects of statistics, I chose to put the students in a situation where they themselves would generate data and then work with it using relatively simple statistical tools in order to see that, even if they weren’t ‘good’ with math, they could do QUAN research.  And those who thought that QUAL research would be easy to do found out just how hard it is to analyze thousands of words.

The course got mixed reviews from the students after it was done, but as I noted, the course was meant to induce some discomfort; my concern was not high course evaluation scores, but helping the students to be ready to start their thesis work. The kinds of things that inspired me were student reactions where I could see an “opening” of their presuppositions about what legitimate research looked like. For example, in my first run of the class in 2004, I became so excited that I called my wife to my computer to show her an online posting where one of my very strong science-focused students wrote that she now saw that QUAL approaches were not simply different from the QUAN approaches she was used to, but that you could ask different and equally important question when using QUAL approaches.

Along with Aristotle, I feel that the way you learn about research is by doing research. More than many things we offer at a university, engaging in a research project becomes an apprenticeship in learning a new craft. Crafts are historically entered into by novices starting with simple tools and projects and moving towards larger and more complex ones within the social context of working with other apprentices all under the guidance of “masters.”

Lave and Wenger (1991) note “learners inevitably participate in communities of practitioners and that the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community” (p. 29). I saw this course as the first step towards moving into that “full participation” that would continue into and through their graduate thesis process.

References

Aristotle. (1994/250 BCE). Nicomachean Ethics, Book II. Retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii.html

Cohen, L., Manion, L., & Morrison, K. (2007). Research methods in education (6th ed.). Routledge Falmer.

Kovan, J. T., & Dirkx, J. M. (2003, February). “Being called awake”: The role of transformative learning in the lives of environmental activists. Adult Education Quarterly, 53(2), 99-118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713602238906

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation. University of Cambridge Press.

Leedy, P. D., & Ormrod, J. E. (2013). Practical research: Planning and design (10th ed.). Pearson Education Inc.

Lowry, R. (2021). VassarStats: Website for Statistical Computation. http://www.vassarstats.net/

Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row.

Peters, R. S. (1964). Education as initiation (Vol. 15). University of London Institute of Education.

Robson, C. (2011). Real world research: A resource for users of social research methods in applied settings (3rd ed.). John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Sosu, E. M., McWilliam, A., & Gray, D. S. (2008). The complexities of teachers’ commitment to environmental education: A mixed methods approach. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 2(2), 169-189. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1558689807313163

Trochin, W. M. K. (2022) Research Methods Knowledge Base. https://conjointly.com/kb/

Vaughan, C., Gack, J., Solorazano, H., & Ray, R. (2003, Spring). The effect of environmental education on schoolchildren, their parents, and community members: A study of intergenerational and intercommunity learning. Journal of Environmental Education, 34(3), 12-21. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00958960309603489

Wengraf, T. (2007). Interviewing for life-histories, lived situations and ongoing personal experiencing: The Biographic-Narrative Interpretive Method (BNIM). Guide to BNIM interviewing and interpretation. https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2014/SOC932/um/Wengraf_manual.pdf