Chapter one gave us a general view of real world research; especially, the Box 1.1 showed some examples to help us to distingue the real world research and academic research. Also I learned a lot of useful preparations for doing the real world research in the future. What I like most is the Robson’s suggestion that “It is good practice to keep a full and complete record of all the various activities with which you are involved in connection with the project.”Everyone knows that the best memory is the pencil. Robson also gave us some possible content should be included in our diary. I will try to make record for some kinds of things even it is difficult to keep doing.

The chapter two introduced several main approaches to do the research, such as “positivist assumptions”, “relativistic”, “emancipator paradigm”, and “realist”. All the contents have already been introduced in prior reading, so I want to talk about the “scientific attitude”. Robson mentioned “systematically”, “sceptically”, and “ethically” involves carrying out research. In my opinion, the ethically is most important since the research result will not be widely accepted without ethical responsible.

Chapter three is most important in part I because it turns back to “real world” and provides a lot of real world approaches to develop the ideas. I like the “good research questions” in Box3.5, which clear and detail the tips for us to do a good research. It is very useful for me because I am a beginner in everything related to “research”, and I will enjoy reading the rest of this book.  

Waula is great online storage technology that allows you to also socialize with other online users who share their sites. This is different than facebook, as facebook doesn't offer to store your hard drives data onto their system and neither does Google docs or WordPress. However, they do relate with one another as they allow users of their sites to post comments on existing content, such as recent posts (text, articles, videos, etc...). WordPress is limited to only message posts, but does offer a number of cool widgets that can be installed on its site. Waula on the other hand doesn't have much else other than storing content and allowing message posts of that stored content.

- Ah! First of all, thanks God, that, after dealing with a lot of philosophical and complicated viewpoints and sayings, for a relatively long time, at last we reached a book with many attractive statements and viewpoints about a great kind of research, which I like very much!

- Robson, in this book, talks about real world research as investigations concerning people in “real life” situations. He calls this kind of research as “flexible design” versus “fixed design”.

- In chapter 1, the author explains about real world enquiry, fixed and flexible designs, and action research, evaluation, and change.

- Fixed designs, relying on quantitative data as well as statistical generalization, usually are involved with a considerable amount of pre-specification about what and how the research is supposed to be done (Experiments and surveys are two examples of this kind of research). While, flexible design, relating to enquiry in the real world, usually doesn’t have much pre-specification, rather, is interactive and would be developed within the process of proceeding research.

- The author assesses the combination of these two methods, called as “mixed-method”, with taking advantage of using both quantitative and qualitative data, and using two or more methods, as a plausible strategy (I do agree with him about that).  

- One difference between real world research and pure research is the emphasis of the first one on “evaluation”. Based on this evaluation, researcher suggests a desirable change.

- In chapter 2, Robson explores scientific aspect of a research, and argues about its advantages. To do this, he discusses and compares positivism, post-positivism, relativists, critical approaches (especially feminism), constructivism, realism, and critical realism (as a third way, between positivism and relativism, and also as a supporter for the potential of social research to be known as an emancipator approach).

- In chapter 3, reviewing differences between fixed and flexible design, Robson, elaborates a set of steps needed in deciding on the focus and also on the questions of a research in a real world study. Furthermore, he describes the place of theories in carrying out an applied research.   

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- Although I agree with most of the ideas of the author about the advantages of real world research, I disagree with his viewpoints about science. In my opinion, by seeing that some of scientists use their science and innovations in the ways that are harmful to human being, we cannot conclude that all scientists do so. We cannot negate the humanitarian aid of thousands of scientists over the history of man, without which we might were suffering from enormously serious problems. If we accept that doing a collaborative research or evaluation in the limited size of an organization would add a great deal of values, how we can disregard the world-wide scope effects of a scientific theory or an invention.

I think even in doing a real world research, if a researcher can contribute to the construction of a theory and in this way combine her/his improvement suggestion to theory construction, she/he would be doing an excellent job (As Robson, himself, has confirmed it as a possible situation in many cases of doing flexible research- he says that although real world researchers, unlike positivist ones, don’t start their research with a theory, rather, may end up it with a theory gained from data gathered in a systematic manner-).

- In my opinion, “collaborative research” or “participatory action research” would be a convenient way for carrying out a real world enquiry and proposing a feasible change. One reason is because in this approach, the knowledge of insiders would be properly integrated with the expertise of outsiders in research and methodologies.

- I think social science theories without any help to practice, would not be of much value; not only because of having or not having effects on the lives of people, but also, because Practice has the potential of helping theory to be improved.

-  One thing, among many other new things, I learned in this course (thanks to Professor Olfman, for that). That is, necessarily each pure science research would not be of enough value. Among the papers we assigned to read and analyze in this course, I found some ones suffering from an acceptable level or degree of quality and plausibility. So, it is not reasonable to say, for example, that each quantitative or positivist research is better than an action research. As mentioned before, a qualitative research can be scientific, as well. Especially, where it takes advantage of making a link between real world research and current formal theories.

 

What a nice surprise Robson is. Clearly positioning himself as a realist in the Preface to The Second Edition, he makes no bones about his belief that the Positivist approach has failed and that the Social Constructionists are a little too loosey-goosey. Realism, at least as I understand it, appears to offer the best approach to producing research that can be used in practice, something that is hugely important to me at this stage of my development. The Realist explanation, which emphasizes "mechanism" within a context, is much more viable for explaining phenomenon that occurs in the real world than the Positivist constant conjunction approach.

Robson's "boxes" are nice little cheat sheets that should be useful for when I embark on my own real world research. In Chapter 3's "Developing Your Ideas" he gives some very good examples of how to create successful research. In Box 3.4 (page 56) he provides hints for both "successful" and "unsuccessful" research which is quite useful. "Successful" item 5 "real world value" and "unsuccessful" item 3 "motivation by publication, money or funding" resonated especially with me.

 The discussion of the "paradigm wars" on page 43 was reinforcement that some of the truculence between Positivists and Interpretivists that I have been sensing whilst reading extracurricular research is not my imagination. It is a little shocking for a freshman like myself to realize that these two camps don't like each other very much. However, if I ever do get those three letters behind my name, I'll probably take just as impassioned a position as the current incumbents ;-)

The first three chapters in Robson have helped my understanding of the vast number of philosophy of science approaches, but I'm still somewhat unsure of what hermeneutics is all about. I will say that these terms pop up in the IS literature consistently that I have read, so it is important to understand their meaning.

I think that Waula is a very powerful social software. It is different from Google docs, Facebook  and any other social software we use before. When I login into Waula, it opens another windows like our computers' hard drive. There are a lot of folders in this new window. We can also join the other group to share our file and get the file sharing by the other people.

 

  I think the appropriate moment to use the Waula is to store big files to let people to download. Waula's advantage is just like the using the FTP server, but it is more convenient to share the file and to leave a message on the file. However, it doesn't have the file browser like Google doc, and photo viewing, photo tag, and the other small game like Facebook.  It means that if Waula want to be different and successful in the future, I think it should enhance the function of file handling in order to add differentiation from the other social software, or it is hard to attract users to use it like Facebook and Google docs.

The Waula application is a social on line storage which allows for a way to store pictures or other items.  The application provides a key on your local computer, after being invited to join a thread.  This allows for group to have access to pictures, etc without others being able to access the data without being in the same group (shared key).  This is a good application for genealogy online among family members.  Family members are invited to join, a key stored onto the member's PC.  Without the key on the PC the data is not viewable/reachable.  Data is encrypted and decrypted for use.  This allows family members to conduct research which is encrypted/decrypted.  This also allows for multiple copies of pictures to family members.  Again, the data stored on the online storage is encrypted and required to be decrypted using a key.  Thus your user name and password must have a key from your PC to access data on the online storage.  There is a public folder in which others may view.

I found this quote rather interesting: "It would appear that no 'scientific revolution,' or Kuhn paradigm, has been developed by a scientist using the research-then-theory or Baconian strategy in his research." (p.150) One would almost wonder why we continue to do research-then-theory. In spite of that, Reynolds tries to present a balanced view by outlining which situations warrant one approach over the other to achieve better efficiency in research. The paper for this week from Dennis et. al. was a good match. I felt it was a good example of the theory-then-research model because the author's are proposing a new idea which potentially could shift how people think about media choices.

 Overall I found this to be a valuable overview of not only the various types of theory but how to test and create those theories. This would've been great to read before Godfrey as Reynolds summarizes Kuhn so well. 

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After we have some senses about what theory, idea, concepts, and statement are, the rest of book continues discussing the forms of theories, testing theories, and strategies for developing a scientific body of knowledge.   

In chapter 5, the author introduces three different kinds of conceptions and their advantage and disadvantage when dealing with the purpose of science. When talking about the set-of-laws form, there is an example of “The Iron Law of Oligarchy”. It is easy to understand the descriptions of “Social system” and “Democratic leadership”, but I am confusing about the concept about “Oligarchical leadership”. According to Michels, the only stable form of leadership is an oligarchical leadership. I just want to know what kind of leadership in USA right now. Everybody knows that USA is the democratic country, but it is looks like an Oligarchical leadership in USA based on the description in the book.

In chapter 6, I continue learning the testing theories. I am very interesting in “it is never possible to prove an abstract statement true for all possible situations as long as future situations are within the scope of the statement.” This is very important for us to do the research in the future. We cannot focus on determining abstract statement either true or false, but try to increase the degree of confidence based on the empirical research.

The rest chapters also gave me a great knowledge about the strategies of research. The two important approaches are research-then-theory and theory-then-research. The author gave a lot of examples to discuss the advantage and disadvantage of both methods. But I like the comparison of them, which can increase the advantage and decrease the disadvantage.

- Describing scientific knowledge as a set of abstract theoretical statements, Reynolds, in chapter 5, identifies three types of conceptions arrangement representing a theory as: “set-of-laws”, “axiomatic” and “causal process”. A set- of- law theory is consisted of a number of laws, all being supported by empirical research, and have some ‘operational definitions’ making them able to be measured directly. An axiomatic theory is a set of interrelated collection of definitions and statements, in the form of axioms and propositions (derived from axioms). A causal process theory is defined as a set of definitions and (existence and causal) statements being interrelated to each other, and unlike the axiomatic theory in which statements are categorized into axioms and propositions, all statements used in this kind of theory are equally important.

- In comparison of these three forms of Theory conceptions, Reynolds refers to some advantages and disadvantages of each one. For set-of-law theories: lack of any “sense of understanding” , prohibition of using un-measurable concepts and hypothetical constructs in statements, and large size of set-of-law theories versus the point that  more than %90 of human knowledge match these kind of statements; for axiomatic theories: difficult selection of axioms, failing to provide a sense of understanding, versus the ability of hypothetical concepts, smaller size, and efficiency of research; and for causal process form: difficult decision on whether all required steps and statements have been specified, versus being used, in a high rate, by social sciences.

- In chapter 6, Reynolds talks about testing of a theory. One important thing he mentions, is that one reason that it seems impossible to prove the truth of an abstract statement, is that it could be proved to be false, in the future. Then, he refers to the extent of correspondence between a statement and the results gained by empirical research, as the most important criterion of evaluation of that statement. In other words, he says that in this way, concrete statements support the usefulness of an abstract statement.

-Statistical decision procedures can be used in order to prove the truth or falsity of a statement. Statistics can be classified into two types: “descriptive statistics” and “inferential statistics”. The first type is used for description of features of an event or phenomenon. The second one is a procedure for supporting decision making of individuals about recognizing a description of a phenomenon as to be true.

- In chapter 7, the author discusses about different strategies used for developing a scientific body of knowledge. He introduces two strategies: ‘research-then-theory’, and ‘theory-then-research’. In the first one, one assumes that there are some real patterns in the world and scientists should discover them, like the approach of Margaret in the cartoon. The second, theory-then-research strategy, assumes that scientists impose some descriptions on phenomena that they study. Then he analyzes strengths and weaknesses of each of these two strategies.

- Then, Reynolds identifies three types of research methods related to social science: ‘individual observation’, ‘survey’, and ‘experimental’. In the first type, researcher observes a social science phenomenon, directly. In the second one, a group of people or social systems are measured concerning specific individual attribute. In the last one, experimental, in a controlled manner, the phenomenon is reproduced and the different measurements are made.

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-My viewpoint about the best strategy for developing a scientific body of knowledge is that a convenient combination of the two strategies of research-then-theory and theory-then-research would be the best. Because, hardly a scientist can discover all laws at the time he/she begins his/her investigation and thinking about a phenomenon, and also it is difficult to define all the variables needed for being measured for a phenomenon. So, considering a rough answer until one can reach to an exact and final answer would be the best solution.