Important Terms Related to Research - Research Aptitude Notes

What is Research?

• The term research comprises of two words, namely ‘re’ means again and ‘search’ means to find out.
• Research is a process of enquiry and investigation.
• It is systematic and methodical.
• It increases knowledge.
• It is a structured enquiry that utilises the acceptable scientific methodology to solve the problem and create new knowledge that is generally applicable.
• It is a way of thinking, it examines critically the various aspects of any professional work.
• Any higher learning institute worth its name thrives on research.

Objectives of research

• Create new knowledge
• Create solutions to a problem.
• Investigate existing problem.
• Review the existing knowledge.
• Explore and analyse more general issues.
• Develop new insight into a phenomenon.

Research related important terms

• It is derived from Greek work that means ‘after or behind or among the natural’
• It is a branch of philosophy that deals with abstract concepts such as being, knowledge, identity, time and space.
• It studies questions related to existence, what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are.
• It asks questions like- 1. What is there? 2. What is it like?

2. Epistemology

• It is the branch of philosophy concerned with the study of knowledge.
• It deals with origin, nature, scope, and methods to acquire new knowledge.
• It is considered one of the main branches of philosophy, along with ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
• The term was first used by Frederick Ferrier.

3. Rationalism

• It regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge.
• It tends to believe that logic and reason as the means of acquiring knowledge.
• Mind is given the authority over senses.
• In this logic and reason come first to conclude something before experience.
• It is associated with deduction.
• Rationalism is opposed to empiricism because it believes that certain truth exists and that the intellect can directly grasp these truths.

4. Empiricists

• It claims that sense experience is the ultimate starting point for all our knowledge.
• The senses give us raw data about the world, and without this raw material, there would be no knowledge at all.
• It emphasises the role of empirical evidences in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions.
• It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypothesis and theories must be tested against observation of natural world.
• It is related to induction.

5. Research paradigms

• It is an approach to conducting research that has been verified by the research community for long and that has been in practice for hundreds of years.
• There is a difference between natural sciences and social sciences and so is the difference between research approaches relating to them.
• Thus, there are two competing paradigms to acquire knowledge. These are positivist paradigm and interpretive paradigms.

6. Positivist paradigm

• It is associated with quantitative research strategies.
• Most of the Scientific or Quantitative research use Positivism as a conceptual framework of research.
• Positivist believes in empirical hypothesis testing.
• In pure sciences, this approach is preferred because of its empirical nature to study facts.
• Positivists believe that the findings of one study can be generalised to another study of a similar kind regardless of it is conducted in a different environment and situations.

7. Interpretive paradigm

• It is associated with qualitative research strategies.
• It is applicable in Social sciences such as history, sociology, political sciences etc.
• In interpretive approach , the research design should be flexible and unstructured.
• The method should be valid and the research design should generate small-scale and intensive data, using insiders accounts and based on descriptions of what is seen and what is heard.

8. Verstehen

• The term is closely associated with the work of the German sociologist, Max Weber.
• It means a systematic interpretive process in which an outside observer of culture attempts to relate to it and understand others.
• Verstehen translates to ‘meaningful understanding; or ‘putting yourself in the shoes of others to see things from their perspective.’

9. Theory

• A theory is a set of systematically related statements, including some law-like generalisations that can be tested empirically.
• A plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena.
• These generalisations provide hypotheses, and those hypotheses determine what must be measured.