The research process typically involves collecting and working with a range of diverse information. Some of the information you will work with will include the existing literature and research relating to your field or topic of interest, which will typically be in the form of published journal articles and reports. You will also work with information that you have gathered at source through the data collection process, for example through interviews, surveys, observations and experimentation. This chapter of the book provides an overview of key considerations and methods for working with the research literature and your own research data. We will also consider the wider professional communities within which we belong as researchers, and explore how we can draw upon these communities to inform, guide and share our research and academic interests.

I think you need to start by finding out what’s been said already. So, things like the literature review, what does academic literature say already? So there’s no substitute for really hard graft, getting started, to find out what the literature says about your topic. Having got that, you identify the things that are known, the things that are well known, and the things that are less well known, and from that, you can begin to tease out what your research question might be, to throw some light upon the things that are less well known. I think the next sort of information is, how are you going to get information, new data to throw light on the things that are less well known? That depends on different disciplines. Myself, I’m quite happy to do that with interviews, semi-structured interviews that have a framework – but allow the respondent to deviate and give you information that you hadn’t thought about. Sometimes, when you’ve gathered your data from a wide range of sources, interviews and so forth, you might want to find out, does this make sense? So you bring together a small focus group and you give them your results, and you say “What do you think? Does this make sense?”, and by doing that from different areas, you can what we call, triangulate the information. So you can look at the information from different directions and see if it tells you the same thing. If it tells you the same thing from a different point of view then you’re fairly certain that this is a good representation of what’s actually happening. If you get different views, then you say “Well, it means different things to different people, let’s explore this further” because we’re maybe talking about different things here. So I think, different ways of doing so. I think the main point of doing so, you have to be consistent in what you’re doing, what you’re gathering, so you have to look at information from literature as a wide scooping up process to see what’s been done and then narrow it down to much more specific points.

The classic thing when you start a project is to learn the difference between what is reliable information and what is less reliable information. What we would say as academics is peer reviewed literature is where you want to start, because that’s been through a process of checking by your peers, by the academic peers, to make sure any bias, or any inflated claims or statements with no evidence, maybe not have been removed entirely but have certainly bene weeded out, which is not the case if you buy, for example, a newspaper. The newspaper reflects the opinions of the publisher and the editor, and within that, so you get right-wing papers and left wing papers, papers with a green perspective and so forth that will tell you a particular slant on the information. Journals will do the same, but journals are actually much more objectified – they’ve taken away the subjective element, the chance of these things being influenced by random facts that are hidden or given presentation to the reader. So I think, undergraduates need to realise to start with journals, perhaps with some textbooks and so on the key topics. They might move into things like what they call the grey literature – material that’s come from reliable organisations, the UN or UNESCO and so forth, which give the information but are being peer reviewed, but nevertheless, are substantially factually accurate and provide the evidence for what they say. Right at the bottom of the tree, are resources off the web for example, which may or may not be accurate. There’s nothing wrong with Wikipedia but Wikipedia is one of many places that is used to try and iterate the knowledge process, and try and streamline it. It depends on what topic you’re looking at, and which part of the web you’re looking at, as to how clear that information is.

As a general rule, see what’s been written before, go into the university library, and look at other dissertations that have been produced before. There’s a thing on the web which is called the index of thesis, which is every UK PHD thesis. You can see the abstract and you can order the full copy of the results. See what’s been written in your field – how they’ve written about it, what they’ve used, what language they’ve used, what references they’ve used, how it’s been done before. Take that to your supervisors and discuss with them “this is a good example, this is a less good example”, so you can learn from what’s been done already very very quickly, just by sucking up what’s available in your local libraries.