final reflection

What is knowledge? That is a question I still have a hard time answering, but after this course I must say that I am much closer to finding the answer. In this course we have talked about a lot of different scientific methods and what type of questions they can answer. We have also talked about different research methods and what their characteristics are and what the advantages with the specific method are. We have also discussed more philosophical topics and different ways to see and perceive the world. All this combined have led med to a better understanding of how to make a research that we can gain new knowledge from.

When doing research it is important to always remember to distance yourself from the subject to be as objective as possible. Though it is important to remember that we can not be truly objective. Just the very basic thing that we are humans makes us look and interpret the world in a specific way that we probably can not change. We can not look at the world from “God’s point of view” which is a world without any experiences intervening with the perception of it. Kant said “Perception without conception is blind and conception without perception is empty” which means that we must interpret the world in some way for it to make any sense. If we only look at the world as it is and never abstract and generalise we can not question it, thus making us slaves to it.

I think the most important thing during research is to always stay open to the fact that anything can happen. We have to be as open minded and objective as humanly possible. When doing research, we often build upon earlier knowledge and theories. This is necessary since if we did not we would never be able to advance and gain new knowledge. But how do we know that these theories are true? It is very hard to say that something is true, we can only call a priori knowledge to be true. An example that I felt came up a lot during this course is when we discovered that the sun does not revolve around earth, and that in fact it is the opposite. That is an example of a paradigm shift. When a theory or something we take for granted is proven to be false, everything that is built upon that theory is probably also false. That is why we always have to be open minded to changes since everything we know only is true in our current paradigm.

During the second half of this course we left the more philosophical topics and talked more about different ways to research and methods to use in that research. Quantitative and qualitative methods are very common to use in a lot of different researches. Quantitative data can be calculated and measured while qualitative data is more open and complex. Both of these methods gives us data and it is up to us as researchers to analyse it and make new knowledge of it. Before this course, I did not really get what was useful with qualitative data and how you analyse it to be something useful. Quantitative data was much easier for me to understand since it feels more scientific, numbers do not lie and so on. I thought that qualitative data only was useful when analysed quantitatively, e.g. how many answered like this and so on. But after this course I understand that qualitative research is very useful when trying to answer complex question with no easy answer. Questions that are so complex and full with variables that we can not answer them with quantitative data. These questions does not end in a definite answer that is a couple of sentences long, rather it ends in an artefact that contains new knowledge.

When trying to come up with an answer to a really complex question or problem it is very important to define it carefully. The more time you spend on understanding and defining a question, the easier it gets to answer it in a correct way. Think more about the problem than the solution, because the solution can make you blind. It can be hard to see the simpler and better solution if you already are set on one answer. When you have defined the question you can probably clearly see what kind of method you have to use to collect the data. I have written in detail about when and why the different kinds of methods are used in different situations in my earlier blog posts. In some cases it is beneficial to mix different types of method, e.g. yes and no questions with some semi structured interviews. It can also be a good idea to just focus on one method, since I think that it sometimes can be hard time to analyse lots of different data and see how it fit together. In some cases it can also be beneficial to not follow any specific methods, instead use logic and reason to come up with an answer. The important thing is not how you collect data, it is how you analyse the data. It is when you analyse the data that it becomes research and we can gain new knowledge.

During this course I feel that I have gained a lot of insight of how to make good research, and it is something I wish I knew when I wrote my bachelor thesis. One thing I learnt is that the method of how you gain data is not the most important part of a research. It is how you analyse the data, and what conclusions you can draw. We gain new knowledge through a rational and open mind to the universe.