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What are the different analytical approaches when writing a research paper?

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تم إضافة السؤال من قبل Salsabeel Al-Abed , Educational Resource Coordinator , Al Tayseer Educational Center
تاريخ النشر: 2018/09/03
Catrin Brooks
من قبل Catrin Brooks , Teacher , Saudi Telecom Company - Stc

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Anna Key
من قبل Anna Key

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Anass Otuom
من قبل Anass Otuom , مدرس ومحكم اكاديمي وباحث ومدرب معتمد ابحث عن عمل , عمل حر

 Following are some notes on the process of writing an essay. They focus on academic writing, although the approach also works with creative and non-academic pieces. The process outlined below will serve you well in high school, college, and the working world beyond, regardless of the tools—from pencil to word processor—you use to write. Think of the following steps as a system for organizing and developing an idea into a completed, polished piece of writing.

Step 1: Brainstorm the problem. When you’re first given an assignment, don’t try to organize your thoughts, and certainly don’t start writing your essay—you probably don’t know what you want to say yet anyway. Simply collect a large number of thoughts—20 or more at a minimum—about the topic. Let your experience be your guide as to what to include. If undecided about a particular idea, include it. Step 2: Look for a unifying theme. When you’ve finished brainstorming, sit back and look at your notes. Start drawing lines to connect (or group) notes around a given idea or theme.1 If you use word processor, drag and drop your thoughts into groups. Are patterns emerging? Are your ideas gravitating toward one or two main themes? If so, your task is to decide on an organizing principle around which you can construct your essay. Will it be chronological order? ascending or descending order of importance? similarities and differences? The strategies for organizing your essay are limited only by your own ingenuity and grasp of the subject. Whichever you choose, however, understand that in this step you’re determining both the content and the sequence of your essay’s middle paragraphs. If you haven’t yet discovered a theme, go back to Step 1 and continue brainstorming. Step 3: Draft a controlling idea. With some concentrated, clear-headed thinking, you should be able to elicit a thesis statement from the facts and ideas you’ve gathered thus far. This goes by one of several names—topic idea, controlling idea, limiting idea. Each name highlights a function of your essay’s opening paragraph.2 Your topic idea controls and limits the information that your essay will contain—think of it as a frame for your essay. If you’re writing about the causes of the Spanish-American War, for example, you can’t include Teddy Roosevelt’s famous charge up San Juan Hill—no matter how good a story it is—because it isn’t within the scope of your controlling idea. Note that your essay’s controlling idea may contain several concepts and require more than one sentence to state. This, in fact, suggests its second major function—your controlling idea should act as a “road map” for the body of your essay. In other words, you should be able to connect each part of your controlling idea, sequentially, with corresponding paragraphs in the body of your essay Step 4: Outline the body of your essay. This is where you begin filling in the specific details that will support and validate your controlling idea. At this stage, 1 Don’t erase anything you’ve written down during the brainstorming process. You may not use all of your notes, but even “bad” ideas can lead to good essays in the future. 2 These first steps sound suspiciously like the scientific method, don’t they? You know, state the problem, gather data, form a hypothesis…. remember, you’re just creating the outline for the body of the essay—you’re not writing the actual paragraphs quite yet. You’ll probably want to try several different ways to organize each paragraph, and it’s a lot easier to work with ideas when they’re still in outline form. 3 Note: After you complete Step 4, you’ll only have an opening paragraph and an outline for the remainder of your paper. Yet to get here you should have spent at least half the time that you’ll devote to your finished essay. These first steps are that important…. Step 5: Refine your controlling idea. Unless you’re very lucky (or very good!) you’ve probably strayed a bit from your draft controlling idea. That is, some part of your outline may not exactly follow what you said the essay is to be about. At this point, you have an editorial decision to make. You can either modify your controlling idea, or restructure the body of the essay to adhere more closely to your original thesis statement. Pick whichever option leaves you with the stronger essay.4 Step 6: Write the middle paragraphs of your essay. Here’s where you flesh out the body of your essay. You’ve already done the hard work—now just follow the outline you developed in Step 4. Use specific examples to support your ideas, and focus your comments, not on what happened, but on why it happened. In other words, don’t tell me, show me. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to forge effective transitions (links) between your paragraphs. Remember, they’re not stand-alone thoughts, but part of an integrated, gradually unfolding argument. Step 7: Write your concluding paragraph. A few do’s and don’ts. Your conclusion should tie together the threads of your argument into its final, finished form. This is where you decided to go when you outlined your paper, so when you get there, stop writing. Don’t restate your controlling idea, summarize obvious points, moralize, get cute, or do anything else that weakens what you’ve taken such pains to develop. Learn when to stop writing—it’s almost as important as knowing what to write. Steps 8 - 12: Revise what you’ve written. Go out for a walk, take a shower—do something to get away from your paper. Give it time to settle. Then come back and look at it—better yet, read it aloud and listen to how it sounds. Make whatever changes you think advisable. Rinse and repeat. That’s about it. No magic, just method. Keep at it—you’ll get better. That’s a promise. 3 Although for the present we’re talking about multi-paragraph essays, this method of writing also works for multi-page papers, up to and including graduate theses. After all, a very large paper can be broken into smaller subsections, “mini-essays” of 350 - 500 words. The outline described in Step Four is just a bit longer…. 4 Sometimes you have to be quite ruthless in excising wonderful phrases, ideas, or even paragraphs that in the end simply don’t belong in your essay. Just remember, don’t throw them out. You may always be able to recycle them in future writing.

Mohamed Mahmoud Elazab Ali
من قبل Mohamed Mahmoud Elazab Ali , Principal Geologist , Egyptian Mineral Resources Authority Manager of Qena Mining Center

  1. I.  Groups of Research Methods

    There are two main groups of research methods in the social sciences:

    1. The empirical-analytical group approaches the study of social sciences in a similar manner that researchers study the natural sciences. This type of research focuses on objective knowledge, research questions that can be answered yes or no, and operational definitions of variables to be measured. The empirical-analytical group employs deductive reasoning that uses existing theory as a foundation for formulating hypotheses that need to be tested. This approach is focused on explanation.
    2. The interpretative group of methods is focused on understanding phenomenon in a comprehensive, holistic way. Interpretive methods focus on analytically disclosing the meaning-making practices of human subjects [the why, how, or by what means people do what they do], while showing how those practices arrange so that it can be used to generate observable outcomes. Interpretive methods allow you to recognize your connection to the phenomena under investigation. However, the interpretative group requires careful examination of variables because it focuses more on subjective knowledge.

    II.  Content

    The introduction to your methodology section should begin by restating the research problem and underlying assumptions underpinning your study. This is followed by situating the methods you will use to gather, analyze, and process information within the overall “tradition” of your field of study and within the particular research design you have chosen to study the problem. If the method you choose lies outside of the tradition of your field [i.e., your review of the literature demonstrates that the method is not commonly used], provide a justification for how your choice of methods specifically addresses the research problem in ways that have not been utilized in prior studies.

    The remainder of your methodology section should describe the following:

    • Decisions made in selecting the data you have analyzed or, in the case of qualitative research, the subjects and research setting you have examined,
    • Tools and methods used to identify and collect information, and how you identified relevant variables,
    • The ways in which you processed the data and the procedures you used to analyze that data, and
    • The specific research tools or strategies that you utilized to study the underlying hypothesis and research questions.

    In addition, an effectively written methodology section should:

    • Introduce the overall methodological approach for investigating your research problem. Is your study qualitative or quantitative or a combination of both (mixed method)? Are you going to take a special approach, such as action research, or a more neutral stance?
    • Indicate how the approach fits the overall research design. Your methods for gathering data should have a clear connection to your research problem. In other words, make sure that your methods will actually address the problem. One of the most common deficiencies found in research papers is that the proposed methodology is not suitable to achieving the stated objective of your paper.
    • Describe the specific methods of data collection you are going to use, such as, surveys, interviews, questionnaires, observation, archival research. If you are analyzing existing data, such as a data set or archival documents, describe how it was originally created or gathered and by whom. Also be sure to explain how older data is still relevant to investigating the current research problem.
    • Explain how you intend to analyze your results. Will you use statistical analysis? Will you use specific theoretical perspectives to help you analyze a text or explain observed behaviors? Describe how you plan to obtain an accurate assessment of relationships, patterns, trends, distributions, and possible contradictions found in the data.
    • Provide background and a rationale for methodologies that are unfamiliar for your readers. Very often in the social sciences, research problems and the methods for investigating them require more explanation/rationale than widely accepted rules governing the natural and physical sciences. Be clear and concise in your explanation.
    • Provide a justification for subject selection and sampling procedure. For instance, if you propose to conduct interviews, how do you intend to select the sample population? If you are analyzing texts, which texts have you chosen, and why? If you are using statistics, why is this set of data being used? If other data sources exist, explain why the data you chose is most appropriate to addressing the research problem.
    • Describe potential limitations. Are there any practical limitations that could affect your data collection? How will you attempt to control for potential confounding variables and errors? If your methodology may lead to problems you can anticipate, state this openly and show why pursuing this methodology outweighs the risk of these problems cropping up.

    NOTE:  Once you have written all of the elements of the methods section, subsequent revisions should focus on how to present those elements as clearly and as logically as possibly. The description of how you prepared to study the research problem, how you gathered the data, and the protocol for analyzing the data should be organized chronologically. For clarity, when a large amount of detail must be presented, information should be presented in sub-sections according to topic.

    ANOTHER NOTEIf you are conducting a qualitative analysis of a research problem, the methodology section generally requires a more elaborate description of the methods used as well as an explanation of the processes applied to gathering and analyzing of data than is generally required for studies using quantitative methods. Because you are the primary instrument for generating the data, the process for collecting that data has a significantly greater impact on producing the findings. Therefore, qualitative research requires a more detailed description of the methods used.

    YET ANOTHER NOTE:  If your study involves interviews, observations, or other qualitative techniques involving human subjects, you may be required to obtain approval from your Institutional Review Board before beginning your research. If this is the case, you must include a statement in your methods section that you received official endorsement and adequate informed consent from the IRB and that there was a clear assessment and minimization of risks to participants and to the university. This statement informs the reader that your study was conducted in an ethical and responsible manner. In some cases, the IRB approval notice is included as an appendix to your paper.

    III.  Problems to Avoid

    Irrelevant DetailThe methodology section of your paper should be thorough but to the point. Do not provide any background information that does not directly help the reader understand why a particular method was chosen, how the data was gathered or obtained, and how the data was analyzed in relation to the research problem [note: analyzed, not interpreted! Save how you interpreted the findings for the discussion section]. With this in mind, the page length of your methods section will generally be less than any other section of your paper except the conclusion.

    Unnecessary Explanation of Basic ProceduresRemember that you are not writing a how-to guide about a particular method. You should make the assumption that readers possess a basic understanding of how to investigate the research problem on their own and, therefore, you do not have to go into great detail about specific methodological procedures. The focus should be on how you applied a method, not on the mechanics of doing a method. An exception to this rule is if you select an unconventional methodological approach; if this is the case, be sure to explain why this approach was chosen and how it enhances the overall process of discovery.

    Problem BlindnessIt is almost a given that you will encounter problems when collecting or generating your data, or, gaps will exist in existing data or archival materials. Do not ignore these problems or pretend they did not occur. Often, documenting how you overcame obstacles can form an interesting part of the methodology. It demonstrates to the reader that you can provide a cogent rationale for the decisions you made to minimize the impact of any problems that arose.

    Literature ReviewJust as the literature review section of your paper provides an overview of sources you have examined while researching a particular topic, the methodology section should cite any sources that informed your choice and application of a particular method [i.e., the choice of a survey should include any citations to the works you used to help construct the survey].

    It’s More than Sources of Information!A description of a research study's method should not be confused with a description of the sources of information. Such a list of sources is useful in and of itself, especially if it is accompanied by an explanation about the selection and use of the sources. The description of the project's methodology complements a list of sources in that it sets forth the organization and interpretation of information emanating from those sources.

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Comparative, traditional among others

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