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Getting started: developing research ideas

Getting started: developing research ideas. Associate Professor Bruce Johnson Dean: Research Education. Division Research Skills Day – 9 th March 2007. Overview. What is research? What should we research? Why? What are good research questions? Mapping a research topic – how to do it

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Getting started: developing research ideas

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  1. Getting started: developing research ideas Associate Professor Bruce Johnson Dean: Research Education Division Research Skills Day – 9th March 2007

  2. Overview • What is research? • What should we research? Why? • What are good research questions? • Mapping a research topic – how to do it • Workshop methods

  3. What is research • Research is an active, diligent and systematic process of inquiry that is undertaken to gain deeper understanding of or knowledge about things, events, behaviours, and ideas.

  4. What is research? • Research is an active, diligent and systematic process of inquiry that is undertaken to gain deeper understanding of or knowledge about things, events, behaviours, and ideas.

  5. What is research? • Active • Diligent • Systematic • Process of inquiry • Understanding • Knowledge • Things • Events • Behaviours • Ideas

  6. What should we research? • Something in your everyday world that catches your interest and then ask BIG and DEEP questions about it.

  7. What should we research? • Something in your everyday world that catches your interest and then ask BIG and DEEP questions about it. • Example: Bystanders

  8. Bystanders

  9. What should we research? • Answer the question: ‘If I decide to do this research and someone then asks, “so what?”, will I be able to give a credible answer?’

  10. What should we research? • Answer the question: ‘If I decide to do this research and someone then asks, “so what?”, will I be able to give a credible answer?’ • Avoid the totally parochial. • Avoid the truly trivial.

  11. 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners • Acoustics: for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.

  12. 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners • Acoustics: for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard. • Biology: for showing that the female malariamosquitoAnopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

  13. 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners • Ornithology: for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.

  14. 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners • Ornithology: for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches. • Medicine: for the medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage“.

  15. 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Winners • Peace: for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant - a device that makes annoying high-pitched noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephoneringtones that are audible to teenagers but probably not to their teachers.

  16. Quiet self reflection • What are my motivations for doing research? Are they positive and will they sustain me? • Where do my research ideas come from? Are they things that I genuinely find fascinating and absorbing? • Is my research idea capable of passing the ‘so what?’ test?

  17. What are good research questions? • They don’t invite yes/no answers. • They are answerable through investigation. • They should be brief. • They have a demonstrable relationship with existing literature in the area. • They lead to projects that are achievable within time and other constraints. • They will show how you have been selective about what to look at – they will make this transparent.

  18. Conclusions • What is research? • What should we research? Why? • What are good research questions? • Mapping a research topic – how to do it Had some fun too!!

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