Articles
o  Justice for All
o  Church in Decline
o  Striking Similarity
o  The Efficacy of Prayer
o  Are You Ready for Change?
o  A Question of Vocation
o  The Challenge of Change
o  Elul 24
o  Elul 23
o  Elul 22

Series [All]
o  Administration
o  Elul 5777 (9)
o  Exploring Translation Theories (25)
o  Live Like You Give a Damn
o  Memory and Identity
o  The Creative Word (19)
o  The Cross-Cultural Process (7)
o  The Old Testament is Dying
o  The Oral Gospel Tradition (4)
o  We the People (8)

Archive

Sunday, 24 May 2015

Why do research?

Interviewing for Education and Social Science Research: The Gateway Approach,
Carolyn Lunsford Mears, Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009, page 16

Lots of people ask this question: what are you doing this for? Mears provides her own answer:

Interviews offer opportunities to cross boundaries of understanding and to learn from the behaviours and life events of others, uncovering insights from the impacts of a situation, or a program, or a policy as revealed in human terms and then communicated in ways that can be used by the people who create the situations, or design the programs, or write the policies.

So it's about communication, right? But what does that do?

My reason for conducting research, quite simply, is to bring people closer to an understanding of the experiences of others so that situations and prgrams and policies can be better understood and, if necessary, improved.

That about sums it up, really. We are looking for improvement!

Posted By Jonathan, 8:00am Comment Comments: