Appendix D: Video Transcripts
2.1 Research is a conversation
Hey, have you walked into a party fashionably late? You show up and the conversation has already started. What’s everybody talking about?
There are two types of people in this world. The uniformed loudmouth who jumps in without looking at multiple points of view and just says whatever he thinks without considering the conversation that’s been going on. Or the person who listens first, then questions and engages.
Research is a conversation, and you are part of that conversation as a student. But it’s important to note that this party has been going for quite a while, long before you got here. As you begin your research with a question or an idea in mind, you’ll want to see what’s being said. You need to catch up on the conversation in order to participate and add something new. These conversations are going on in the humanities, architecture, business, social sciences, and the sciences.
In a conversation, first, you listen. When doing research, first you read. By reading the work of scholars in your field, you’re listening to the conversation and getting ready to ask your own questions. In a conversation, you ask clarifying questions. When doing research, you ask questions and then see if you can find answers in previously published books and articles. In a conversation, you engage and respond with your informed point of view. When doing research, interacting or joining the conversation might be you writing a paper, creating a poster, designing a study, making art, getting a patent, or just giving a presentation. Go have a conversation with a Librarian!
12.1 Methods: structure
Effective structure and organisation is essential for the method section, as it underpins the whole of your research. The method needs a clear internal structure, often much more so than other aspects of writing up research. This is usually achieved using sections and headings. Writing the method in one continuous block of text makes it harder to identify key information about how you did your research. But if we use sections and headings, it’s much easier to follow the method and find the information we need.
Which sections should you include? This very much depends on what’s relevant to your particular research. But, make sure that your sections include all aspects of your method: everything you used and all of the steps you carried out.
We can’t give you specific sections to include, but here are some aspects to consider. Tell us who or what you investigated. This could be participant groups, organisations, animal or plant species, or anything else that was the source of your data. Describe any relevant physical equipment used, such as displays, detectors, analysis devices, or other specialist equipment. Report any materials used, such as surveys, psychological tests, stimuli, chemical solutions, or anything else. The sections and the headings you choose for these areas are particularly dependent on your research!
You’ll need to include the procedure, usually with a step-by-step description of how data were collected. Also tell us about the data analysis, such as data cleaning or preparation steps, any analysis software used, the statistical tests carried out, or any other analysis methods. Sections relating to these areas appear in most methods.
[Logical order]
Once you have your sections and headings, you need to put them in a logical order. Again, what’s logical depends on your particular research. Often it makes sense to order sections chronologically according to when they occurred. Putting it simply; think about before, during and after the research. Before sections cover things you needed to prepare in order to carry out the research. It’s common to start with who or what you investigated, then include equipment, materials or anything else relevant. During includes the data collection procedure and any other sections about what you did. Finally, after covers data analysis or other activities that took place after data collection. If your method has multiple methodologies or experiments, it might make sense to describe these separately. For example, you might describe quantitative methods followed by qualitative methods, or experiment 1 then experiment 2.
[Example]
Let’s think about how to apply this in an example method structure. Our research project compares the efficacy of video and static resources in an online academic writing course. Two groups take the course. One receives content in video format, and the other gets the same content in static documents. At the end of the course, all students complete a written assignment and then we compare the grades for the two groups. How are we going to structure this method? Firstly, we need a participants section, with subsections for the video group and the static documents group. Then let’s add a section for the materials, which in this case are the online resources. Again, we need subsections for the two resource types. We’ll include information on the software used, and other relevant information about how the materials were made. Moving onto the procedure, we need a section about how the online writing course took place. Things like the length of the course, the amount of time that students spent studying and other relevant information. Next, we need a section about the written assignment and how it was marked. The final section covers the data analysis, which in this case is how the assignment scores for the two groups were compared.
For more examples, the best thing to do is to look at papers or student work in your field to see which structures are used in similar research to yours. We also have some more example method structures from different subjects and study levels. The link is in the video description. Find loads more academic and digital skills resources on the Skills Guides: subjectguides.york.ac.uk/skills
