Methodologies & Critical Analysis
Evidence the ability to use logic, reasoning and critial judgement to analyse ideas from a range of primary and secondary sources, employ critical and theoretical methodologies to evaluate examples from the relevant subject discipline.
Evidence the capacity for undertaking a wide range of independent practical and theoretical research that demonstrates as informed application of critical, effective and testable.
Methodology: Informed, critical, logical strategy for undertaking research
self planning and independent research.
- Every research project needs to have a methodology.
- Best and effective plan to maximise results from research.
Simply put
- A logical, systematic, and structured way of organising a research project and gathering necessary information.
- Evidence that you have reflected critically on various research methods and chosen the ones that are most appropriate for your particular research project.
- Why my strategy is the best strategy for my work.
- Critical reflection on the way on approaching a topic.
Books:
Gina Wisker - Palgrave research skills the post graduate research handbook.
Judith Bell - Doing your research project.
Website:
Palgrave study skills - Choosing appropriate research methodologies
What kind of research methods are you going to use?
Quantitative, or qualitative, or a mixture of both?
What do you think your methods will enable you to discover?
What might they prevent you discovering?
What kind of research methods would be best suited to the kind of research you are undertaking and the research questions you are pursuing?
What sort of problems do you envisage in settings up these methods?
What are their benefits?
What will you need to do to ensure they gather useful data?
Your methodology may include:
- Literature review
- Libraries, Journals, Internet
- A particular theoretical approach
- Questionnaire
- Sample size, Reliability and Validity.
- Consider audience age.
- Interviews
- Structured or unstructured? Bias?
- Sketchbooks/critical diaries/reflective logs.
Outline your methodology at the start of the Dissertation.
Critical Analysis
Selecting from a variety of options and choosing the most reliable answer.
Selecting important knowledge.
Skepticism - having an idea and testing that idea
Informed decision making
"Stepping away" and using evidence and logic to come to your conclusions.
Where was the author/artist/designer/photographer situated?
Try to consider different points of view
- Where the creator was coming from intellectually; emotionally; philosophically, politically...
Context is everything
- Consider the influence of one or more of the following: the time; places; society; politics; economics; technology; philosophy; scientific thought
Some perspectives that you might adopt or encounter
- Marxist
- Neoliberal
- Sociological
- Psychological
- Postmodernist
- Technological
- Fundamentalist
- Positivist
Argument
What do I want to say?
How will I answer this?
Whats the point I want to make?
Have I got evidence to back it up?
Am I expressing myself clearly and logically?
Triangulation
Pitting alternative theories against the same body of data
Multiple theories to answer a question, multiple ideas at one subject to find which is the most appropriate.
A bad argument
- Contradict themselves
- Have no relationship with previous statements
- Do not have any logical sequence
- Are based on assumptions that were never questioned
- Appeal to authorities that are known to be limited or suspect
- Present opinion as argument unsupported by evidence
- Try to claim absolute instead of qualified truths
You need to show the reader that you are evaluating the evidence for its relevance and reliability.
Evaluation= Looking at and coming to conclusions about the value of your evidence.
