Starting Academic Research

1. Starting Academic Research Research Design

2. Introduction • Workshop topics for this week: • Academic disciplines and specialisms. • Justifying relevant research questions. • The nature of media and cultural studies. • Isolating research questions from existing studies. • Searching online databases for relevant information.

3. Some broad terms • Study: a detailed investigation. • Scholar: a specialist in a branch of non-technical study. Scholars make detailed investigations and devote time to acquiring knowledge. • Academic: pertaining to scholarship. • An academic [an individual person]: a scholar in a particular discipline. • So what is a discipline?

4. Disciplines • Discipline: a community of people devoted to a particular branch or tradition of scholarship; they usually share the same outlook, philosophy or object. • Disciplines are disciplines because “members share views on the nature of the world, how we can get to know about these, what limits there are to the knowledge produced.” (Shipman 1997, 4) • Can you name, explain and categorize some disciplines?

5. Disciplines • Traditional academic disciplines tended to be either arts or sciences: Arts • Fine arts (study the arts): painting, dance, sculpture, theatre, architecture, photography. • Liberal arts / humanities (study culture): english, history, philosophy. Sciences • Natural sciences (study nature): physics, chemistry, geology, biology, physical geography. • Social sciences (study society): sociology, human geography, anthropology, economics, political economy.

6. Disciplines • In the last century a series of new disciplines have emerged: • Technical: business studies, engineering, media production. • Applied or interdisciplinary: psychology, communication, media studies, cultural studies. • Media studies is characterized by…. ? • Cultural studies is characterized by… ?

7. Disciplines • Fields – or disciplines?Film studies, radio studies, television studies, journalism studies, popular music studies. • Each of these fields can take its one objectin a number of ways. For example in popular music: • Musicology. • Ethno-musicology. • Sociology. • Cultural studies. • History. • Geography. • One a smaller level there are also specific research specialisms – niches such as the sociology of the production of Brazilian hip-hop.

8. Research questions • Questions should be relevant to the academic field, not to technical concerns (eg. avoid “How can a successful label be started”). • Questions should be justified by reference to the discipline, field or specialism, not by reference to the student’s modules or personal passions. • Some certain questions are best avoided.

9. Research questions • Questions probably best avoided: • Popular music and internet downloading. • Celebrity magazines and body image. • Radio and new technology. • Radio and the local community. • Journalism: the internet vs print. • Journalism: the loss of community papers. • Effects of “dangerous” media products, on children, etc. • ‘Uses and gratifications’ of the media. • Feelings or artistic evaluations of media products.

10. QAA guidelines1 • Communications, media, film and cultural studies creates theories about… • … the ways in which cultural and media organisations intersect with general political and economic processes. (Questions of ‘political economy’) • … the ways in which accounts of the world are created and how they mediate symbolically between the individual and society. (Questions of ‘representation’) • … the ways in which questions of creative and cultural value are experienced and understood. (Questions of ‘aesthetics’) • … the ways in which social interactions may operate through circulating meanings and systems of representations. (Questions of ‘discourse’)

11. QAA guidelines • Communications, media, film and cultural studies creates theories about… • … the ways in which creative artefacts are originated, realised and distributed, and the extent to which these processes have changed and continue to change. (Questions of ‘production’ and ‘distribution’) • … the ways in which people appropriate and use cultural texts and practices. (Questions of ‘consumption’) • … the ways in which understandings of self and the world are formed in relation to such texts and practices. (Questions of ‘identity’) • … the relations between systems of meanings and relations of social and political power and inequality. (Questions of ‘ideology’)

12. QAA guidelines • To summarize, for the QAA, media and cultural studies consist of questions of: • Political economy • Representation • (The practice of) aesthetics • Discourse (ways of talking or writing about something) • Consumption • Identity • Ideology (power and inequality) … in relation to specific media (usually electronic) or media forms, like journalism, film and popular music.

13. Secondary research • Anyone who has done an academic essay has already done some secondary research. • Doing secondary research entails: • Finding information (locating, note taking). • Evaluating information (critical thinking). • Presenting what others have said to show understanding and judgement (writing, referencing). Why do secondary research?

14. Isolating research questions • Always look for academic quality. • Seek out relevant classic and contemporary material. • Empirical studies (and position pieces) and most useful. • With each study, isolate the key research question and argument. What qualifies as an academic source?

15. Isolating research questions • Turn the following titles and statements back into research questions: • Book title: The limits of social research. • “My argument is that all media give shape to experience, and they do so in part through their selectivity.” • Book title: Interpreting qualitative data. • “I would argue that a democratic media system would need a large, well-funded, structurally pluralistic, and diverse nonprofit and noncommercial media sector, as well as a more competitive and decentralized commercial sector.”

16. Critical thinking • What does ‘critical thinking’ actually mean?

17. Critical thinking • Critical thinking is more than selecting, summarizing and showing you are informed. • Before critical thinking can happen the thinker needs a range of relevant, specific information.

18. Critical thinking Skills can include… - Stating reasons and evidence to support a point. - Showing various sides and judging between. - Challenging an idea on the basis of its flaws. - Considering if a writer has succeeded in their aim. - Applying a theory to a case study. • Critical thinking describes an attitude towards explanation that says that you are active in the process of making and remaking it. • Researchers think critically by deciding about what others say. • In other words it involves “judgement,” “reasoning,” “discussion” and “evaluation.”

19. Critical thinking • To practice some critical thinking, discuss this definition of the term “popular music” from jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton: [It is] music made by American artists in the popular field. It doesn't matter whether it's hip-hop or rap or whatever -- rap less so because it depends so much on words. It's partly to do with celebrity - the teenager in another country hears the news, and reads about Michael Jackson or Madonna and the others who are on MTV regularly, and have a pretty substantial following around the world. It's as much an American cultural interest as it is a specific music style. I think that's part of why jazz has been interesting worldwide. What are the biases, limitations, possible counter-arguments here? How could we do more secondary research to go further?

20. Bibliography Shipman, M. (1997) The Limits to Social Research. London: Longman.