- 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.