ARAŞTIRMA YÖNTEMLERİ

There is no particular strategy for students and researchers to choose a research topic but there are three well-known reasons that researchers seek after. They are; experience, theory testing, and replication of previous research. Past experiences of professionals can be a strong inspiration for researchers. Researchers are mostly interested in negative experiences for the purpose of improving practices and making them better for next generations. Theories can be used to develop research studies. Even a single study can be the focus of a research to examine its implications. The replication studies refer to repeating a past research recognizing its methodological weaknesses to do a better one. A researcher repeats a study carefully so that the previous limitations will not be repeated.

When the research question is decided, it can be written in either interrogative or declarative form. For example, an interrogative form can be stated as “What factors have changed international relations after the World War II”, while a declarative form of that question can be worded as “An analysis of the reasons behind changes in international relations after the World War II”.

Research questions may arise from various sources. For example, one can get a research question from a discourse with colleagues or from their works and writing. Students may not be excellent source of emerging research questions but their interesting questions generally activate new paths to explore. Roselle and Spray (2011, 5) suggest some sources that may be useful to search for your research topic:

A literature review is considered to be a research methodology in its own right when it is carried out systematically. In other words, if a literature review:

The general purpose of literature review is to narrow down the focus of your research, to focus on it, and to help readers relate it to your research. Purposes of a literature review includes:

To identify the field and specific context in which the topic is located.
To decide which research and methodology will be adopted, which type of data may be collected and analyzed.
To deepen your knowledge related to the key concepts of the research topic
To avoid repeating previous studies that have ben completed before your attempt and to produce an original work.
To avoid the mistakes that past studies reported.
To discover the key people, organizations, and papers related to your research topic.

A literature review can be performed in seven steps:

There are four types of literature review: narrative, systemic, meta-analysis and focused. Narrative reviews are typically found in theses, dissertations, grant and research proposals, and research articles. In such reviews, the author selects relevant past research and synthesizes it into a coherent discussion. Narrative reviews typically are somewhat broad in focus compared to other kinds of literature reviews, discussing methodologies, findings, and limitations in the existing body of work.

Some issues in considering the quality of the information obtained from Web sites can be summarised as follows:

Sources on the Internet are questionable in terms of reliability. The following tips may help you decide the scholarliness of the sources accessed electronically: level of detail, level of discourse, structure, explanation of methodology, footnotes and endnotes, bibliography, and date of publication.

Some common mistakes in writing a literature review include discussing the studies consecutively without making a connection with each other; neglecting to state similar findings of the past research; and including the articles that are almost irrelevant to the research questions. In order to write a literature review, a lot of reading is essential, but not everything read should be included in the review. The researcher should be critical in this perspective.

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.

A literature review can be performed in seven steps (Fink, 2014, 3):

1. Identification of research questions. This step guides the review.

2. Selecting the databases and sources. There are numerous bibliographic or article databases, websites, and other resources that can be utilized.

3. Specifying the key terms. Key terms are the words that are used to search and get the related documents.

4. Applying practical screening criteria. Literature reviewer can set the criteria to include or exclude the documents from the review among the numerous articles.

5. Applying methodological screening criteria. Methodological criteria incorporate criteria for assessing scientific quality.

6. Doing the review. To ensure the reliability and validity of the literature review, a standardized form should be used for abstracting data from papers. Besides, reviewers should be trained for abstracting the data and pilot testing of the process should be reported.

7. Synthesizing the results. Literature review results may be synthesized expressively. An uncommon sort of synthesis-a metaanalysis involves the utilization of statistical results of two or more research.

The correct answer is Choice C.

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.