Students’ Conceptions—and Misconceptions—of Social Research

Barbara Kawulich; Mark W. J. Garner; Claire Wagner

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.5.3.02

Authors

Barbara Kawulich University of West Georgia, USA
Mark W. J. Garner University of Aberdeen, UK
Claire Wagner Department of Psychology, University of Pretoria, SA

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.5.3.02

Keywords:

Conceptions, Phenomenography, Social research methods

Abstract

How knowledge of students’ conceptions of social research can influence the pedagogy of research methods is the focus of this article. This study explains how students’ conceptions of social research changed over the course of a two-semester research programme. Twenty-nine graduate students participated in focus groups, interviews, and open-ended surveys to inform the instructor’s pedagogical decisions in developing the course. Data were analyzed phenomenographically, and the categories that were identified defined changes in their conceptions of research related to affect and attitudes, the processes involved with conducting research, and the end products of their research projects. Pedagogical inferences were derived from the findings, and implications for future research were outlined.

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Author Biographies

Barbara Kawulich, University of West Georgia, USA

Barbara Kawulich is an Associate Professor in Educational Leadership at the University of West Georgia, USA. Her interests include research methodology, particularly qualitative methodologies, and issues of interest to indigenous women. She co-edited "Teaching Research Methods in the Social Sciences" with the co-authors of this article and has numerous other articles in Advancing Women in Leadership, Journal of Research in Education, and Forum: Qualitative Social Research, among others. She and her co-authors are pursuing further research in the area of conceptions of research and other gaps in the literature on research methodology.

Mark W. J. Garner, University of Aberdeen, UK

Mark Garner is Head of Linguistics at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. Within Linguistics, his field of expertise is applied discourse analysis, and he has been principal co-investigator for a number of communication research projects for the police, emergency and rescue services, and more recently for healthcare agencies. He is also interested in research methodology, in particular, in incorporating the specialist skills of linguistic analysis within the framework of broader social science approaches. He has developed postgraduate research methods courses in universities in three countries, and pioneered interest in research methods pedagogy as a field of enquiry in its own right. He has written books and published extensively in journals on a wide range of topics in applied linguistics and research methods.

Claire Wagner, Department of Psychology, University of Pretoria, SA

Claire Wagner is an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Her interests are in research methodology across the social sciences and environmental psychology. She has co-edited a book on teaching research methods (Ashgate 2009) and has published articles on the topic in Studies in Higher Education, South African Journal of Higher Education, South African Journal of Psychology amongst others. She is currently exploring published research on teaching research methods with the coauthors of this article to identify gaps in the literature and to suggest future research agendas.

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