ARAŞTIRMA YÖNTEMLERİ - Deneme Sınavı - 14

In inductivism, the starting point is observations of singular facts, events, or happenings, then expressing them as singular observation statements. An important condition is that the observations must be theoryfree in order to prevent contamination of pure facts with a previously accepted theory.

According to Kuhn, paradigm comes prior to any set of activities or procedures and provides the practitioners with the current state of knowledge and practices of a field. A paradigm is defined as a worldview, or an intellectual or theoretical framework that provides guidance for the engagement of the community of scientists with their phenomena of interest.

Idealism argues that there is no material, or no physical external world that is the basis of our reality. Thus, our reality does not correspond to a reality existing independent of our minds. Further, what we perceive are just ideas in our minds.

Axiological knowledge can also be called a “theory of experience”. This kind of knowledge is created by practitioners who share their long-term experiences. Axiological knowledge may include important conclusions and generalizations. This kind of literature knowledge does not mean technicalities but the world of practice. So, the literature reviewer should notice the potential use of the axiological knowledge and avoid using it as a theory or prior research. The correct answer is Choice B.

Political scientists define “the circumstances, topics, policies, or other phenomena that they want to understand as dependent variables”. For instance, when a researcher likes to investigate the reasons for a failing policy, the dependent variable of the study is “the failure of the policy”. The correct answer is Choice A.

Meta-analysis is performed by statistical techniques combining data from multiple studies that have analyzed the same research questions. Re-analyzing different sets of data related to the same research question provides a much better understanding than that of a single study. The correct answer is Choice D.

There are three types of sources of information: primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.

1. Primary sources. The person presenting the data is actually present in primary sources (Anderson, 2005, 12). Original written works such as poems, diaries, court records, interviews, surveys and original research/fieldwork and research published in scholarly journals.

2. Secondary sources. When the data is reported from another author or source who is not present at the work cited, it is called secondary data (Anderson, 2005, 12). In other words, secondary sources are those which narrate and examine the primary sources/original research.

3. Tertiary sources. These kinds of sources organize and locate secondary and primary source. They can be summarized as follows:

• Indexes – provide citations that fully identify a work with information such as author, titles of a book, article, and/or journal, publisher and publication date, volume and issue number and page numbers.

• Abstracts – summarize the primary or secondary sources

• Databases – are online indexes that usually include abstracts for each primary or secondary resource, and may also include a digital copy of the resource.

The correct answer is Choice A.

The Internet material can be ranked as reliable, fairly reliable and unreliable in terms of their sources:

Likely to be very reliable:1. Peer-reviewed journal articles that are also published in an academic journal. These should be referenced according to their paper details, rather than as an Internet resource. 2. Peer-reviewed journal articles published in genuine electronic journals. These should be referenced using their volume number and date, plus the full web address. It is possible that they will not have page numbers. 3. Already published journal articles and book chapters that have been posted, usually in PDF format, on an academic’s home page. Check, however, that it is the published version. If it says ‘submitted to’ a journal, or ‘draft’, it has yet to be peer-reviewed. You could then check if it has since been published. 4. Electronically readable books written by subject experts. 5. Official materials published on a recognized institutional website, e.g., the British Museum site, or the Institute of Linguists’ site. You can find out what site you are on by going to the homepage.

Likely to be fairly reliable 1. The pre-peer-reviewed material, as described in (3) above but track down the published version if possible. 2. Lecture or research notes on the site of an academic working at a recognized institution.

Likely to be unreliable 1. The material on the home pages of individuals. 2. The material on organization websites that is written by enthusiasts rather than experts. 3. Free-for-all post-your-views sites (unless restricted to a recognized set of academic contributors). 4. Weblogs (blogs), chatroom pontifications, etc.

The correct answer is Choice D.

Lodico et al. (2006, 43) explain additional issues in considering the quality of the information obtained from Web sites. They can be summarised as follows.

1. Authority. The producer, or sponsor of the website should be clear and verifiable. This information can be mostly checked by clicking the button “About Us”. If this information is not available, it is better not too use it.

2. Accuracy. Factual information such as data and names should match those found in almanacs, encyclopedias or other reference books. If the information is not consistent with the prestigious sources, the author should discuss its reasons. If the accuracy of the web source is uncertain, it should not be preferred.

3. Objectivity. The literature reviewer should be careful about the sponsor’s point of view in case of biased expressions. The website should balance different points of views. Otherwise, it should not be taken as a trusted source.

4. Currency. The website should give information about the uploading date of the document, the beginning and the end of the pages. If the document is not dated but include an bibliography, you can examine the references for up-to-dateness. The APA manual allows the n.d. usage for the unknown date of a source.

5. Coverage. The site should fully cover its topic within the limits the authors determine themselves. It is not important whether the coverage is narrow or broad but it is important that the site claim the accurate information.

The correct answer is Choice D.

The library catalog enables researchers to search and locate print and online materials (books, journals, and other resources) held in the library. A journal may be available with an online link from the library catalog but some content may not be allowed to access. Instead, the library catalog may direct you to an available link that provides the content you search for (Jesson, Matheson and Lacey, 2011, 36). Library catalog or Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) give the bibliographical details and locations of all the publications held within a specific library. The Library of Congress Classification classification is especially appropriate for the research universities and is used in some of the libraries in Turkey such as Middle East Technical University, Anadolu University and Hacettepe University. The correct answer is Choice C.

The function, content, and structure of bibliographic databases are different. Some are just files, containing foremost essential bibliographic data on papers (Trawick and McEntyre, 2004). The term ‘bibliographic databases’ defines the “abstracting and indexing services for the scholarly literature”. Over the past decade, technological developments expanded the horizons of the bibliographic database from abstracts to longer pieces of texts. The correct answer is Choice A.

The inadequate training in conducting a literature review leads students learning by themselves, mostly by trial and error method, and this in a number of common problems and mistakes (Baumeister, 2013, 125-129):

1. Uncertain Purpose. The purpose of the study should be made clear not simply by summarizing the past studies or findings. Instead of this, the researcher should contribute to the literature by offering a new and developed understanding related to the selected topic. For this reason, the literature review should be clearly defined with the goal of advancing the field’s theoretical or conceptual knowledge.

2. Vague Introduction and Poor Organization. Many writers have difficulty in following the plan which dictates that the introduction should define the goals clearly and then explain the theoretical framework carefully and thoroughly.

3. Not Enough Information. One of the common mistakes is to fail to present satisfactory information about the literature review. Sometimes authors do not give enough information about how they reach their conclusions. A well-structured literature should make a summary of the methods and findings of the studies cited rather than the conclusions. You do not need to write multiple paragraphs on every reference you cited. But you have to give adequate information to provide the reader to make up their own reasoning whether the arguments make up your conclusions. Sometimes the opposite of this comes to existence. Presenting excessive details is another undesirable situation in literature reviews. The more you write, the more you risk making an error.

4. Failing to Connect to Take-Home Message. The take-home message should move the reader beyond the current state of knowledge on a specific topic by your comments which have the potential to develop the theory. The take-home message is your point of view expressed clearly in general discussion and abstract sections. “The take-home message is the capsule value of your paper, and everything in the paper should refer to it”.

5. Be Critical. Another common mistake is the lack of criticism. In social sciences, every study has a limitation and they should be discussed. The criticism can be performed under the sub-heading such as literature and findings. Your paper’s value will increase if you can discuss the weaknesses and strengths of the evidence you referred. As a researcher/literature reviewer your role is not that of a lawyer who seeks to prove the best case for one side of the argument. Instead, your role is to consider the evidence skeptically like a judge or jury. Another error related to this point is that, some writers fail to be consistent with what they evidenced and concluded. Your conclusions should coincide with the weaknesses and the strengths of what you discussed in the literature, methods, and findings subheadings.

6. Exceptions and Counterexamples. It is important to control the results and conclusions of the biases that ordinary people bear for selective critique of every day processes. The literature reviewer is likely to recognize similar tendencies when a conclusion goes with prevailing wisdom and or seems politically correct. The literature reviewer should avoid such tendencies as far as possible. The literature reviewer should also avoid seeking supportive examples for the research topic. This kind of approach will cause “confirmation bias”. To overcome this threat, the literature reviewer should spend time for inconsistent evidence.

7. Tell the Reader Where to Go. A successful literature review should open up a space for future researchers implying the research priorities. More specifically, the literature reviewer should discuss the strong, weak and ambiguous points of the paper to provide the reader with a focus on these issues in the future research.

8. Matters of Style. One of the critical issues in writing a literature review is following the guidelines and instructions for style. First responsibility of the researcher is citing the author/s and the date of statements in parentheses in the text properly. The format of citing should be correct in terms of referencing style to enable readers to make distinctions about different writers’ thoughts and findings. However, the literature reviewer should not let the names to have a principal position in the paper. One rule of thumb is “Do not start a paragraph with a name!”. 

Some other common literature review mistakes referred in the literature are as follows (Roselle and Spray, 2011, 53):

1. Discussing the studies consecutively without making a connection with each other

2. Neglecting to state similar findings of the past research

3. Including the articles that are almost irrelevant to the research questions.

The correct answer is Choice C.

Ontology is a particular focus area within metaphysics, which focuses particularly on the study of “being” or “existence.” The term ontology also comes from the ancient Greek roots, from “ontos” which means “being”, “to be” or “to exist” and from “logos” which means “the study of.” Thus, ontology can be defined as the philosophy or the study of being or existence. Thus, ontology focuses on questions related to abstract concepts such as “what is it mean to exist?”, “What is the unchanging substance of the existing things?”, “Is there an objective, unchanging reality beyond humanperception and conception?” and so on.

Case study is the most widely employed design in IR, and this is an increasing tendency in the field. The efforts to figure out complex social events or phenomena can be taken as the reason for this inclination. A simplified definition of case study could be the attempt to seek answers to “how?” or “why?” concerning a current case of interest (Gray, 2009; Maoz, 2002; Yin, 2014; Wiener, 2009). According to Yin (2014), case study refers to examination of a case in real life (context) when the boundaries between an event and its context are obscure. The correct answer is A.

Stemming from anthropology and sociology, ethnography is a research design where a researcher analyzes common behaviors, language, and action models of an intact culture within their natural environment during a long time-span. Wolcott (2008) states that ethnography is a study conducted on social behaviors of a definable human group instead of a study conducted on culture. The correct answer is B.

Narrative inquiry basically focuses on human experiences and stories. Relevant literature hosts narrative inquiries under several names such as autobiographies, individual narrations, narrative interviews, life documents, life stories and histories, oral history, ethno-history, ethno-biography, auto-ethnography, ethno-psychology, and personalized ethnography. Czarniawska (2004) diagnoses narrative inquiry design as written documents and conversations interpreted about an event or a course of events that are chronologically related. Narrative inquiry is based on sharing experiences about an event or a chain of events with another or others through any channel of communication.The correct answer is C.

Grounded theory is a qualitative research design aiming to find out a general abstract theory about a process, action, or interaction grounded in participants’ standpoint. Thus, in option E, it is related to grounded theory research design. The correct answer is E.

Grounded theory is one of the qualitative research methods where a series of methods are systematically operated in order to develop an inductive theory (Glaser, 2002). It is defined as a process in which the researcher digs out a general abstract theory about a process, action, or interaction grounded in participants’ standpoint (Corbin and Strauss, 2008). The correct answer is C.

In qualitative research, triangulation refers to the use of more than one method in order to study, define, and explain the problem as comprehensively as possible and to establish necessary credibility (reliability) and validity.The correct answer is A.

Researcher diary can be noted as the most important data source for a researcher administering a qualitative research. Diary can be described as a source of data where the researcher writes down her/his comments, feelings, and opinions about events that s/he observes and hears and where s/he can add her/his reflections about her/his experience (Glesne, 2012). A researcher diary can be conceived as a written log of researcher’s actions, opinions, and feelings during the design, data collection, analysis, reporting, and presentation steps of a given research.The correct answer is E.