Secrets of Good Research
After getting your PhD
by one means or another, the second most important thing for a
doctoral student is actually learning how to do good research.
(If it's not for you, you can stop reading right now.) If you
already have a PhD you may still not know a lot of what you need
to about really good research.
Learning to do good research is usually presented as a technical
issue: acquiring skills and techniques of data collection,
analysis, and presentation. This is the least of it. Anyone can
learn these skills fairly easily if they can find a reasonably
coherent teacher (though this is not as easy as it sounds).
What really matters to good research is good judgment, about:
what is worth investigating, what methods will yield interesting
results, which bodies of knowledge or conceptual theories to draw
upon, and which to connect your results back to.
These matters are not easily taught or learned explicitly. They
are acquired by participation in a community of practice, and
they are to some extent arbitrary creations of these communities.
They are a kind of habitus, a system of dispositions that tend
even unconsciously to guide you in fruitful directions. You
acquire them by hanging out with people who have them, regardless
of the official status of these people. Most university faculty
members in any given department, even at good universities, do
not display these dispositions very notably. Neither are these
entirely matters of superficial and ephemeral fashion. Primarily
they are matters of philosophical disposition, of thoughtfulness,
of genuine intellectual engagement with substantive issues. You
need to find people who have really thought long and deeply about
what they are doing and what other people are doing. Such people
are always rare.
Some guidance for your
search. Older, European-trained faculty members are a good bet.
Their academic culture insisted on deep philosophical
analysis of the foundational assumptions of the discipline, its
concepts and methods, and its various alternative schools of
thought. If you are in a program that is dominated by a single
theoretical, philosophical or methodological perspective, go
looking for people, perhaps outside the program or in other
departments, who know the alternatives and the arguments pro and
con. Find people who know something about the history of the
discipline, back to the 19th or early 20th century. Do not
underestimate the importance of history: it tells you who won the
wars, where the bodies are buried, which roads could have been
taken but weren't. What you are being taught as a simple matter
of the cumulative discovery of truth is merely history as written
by the victors, and no one's version should be trusted less.
For students in the human sciences, I do not especially recommend
Philosophy or History as academic subjects in their own right,
but for the invaluable perspectives they provide on any other
discipline or research issue. Read the philosophers (with help
and guidance: what they say and what they have come to mean are
often quite different) that are relevant to the fields you work
in. Everyone has to read Plato and Aristotle and Kant; if you
haven't, plan some time to do so. Not because they are right, but
because the philosophers who come later and are more relevant to
contemporary concerns write in a framework that presupposes
familiarity with them, just as much European literature
presupposes that you have read the Jewish and Christian sacred
texts or classical Greco-Roman mythology.
Get to know the
major theories, or
meta-theories, that shape intellectual issues today: semiotics,
hermeneutics, phenomenology; critical social theory, gender
theory, the postmodernisms.
Ignore the rhetoric of exclusion by which writers try to show
that any one of these is best. They are all valuable, in
combination; each complements the others in various ways. They
are all perhaps opposed to an older alignment, variously (and not
very aptly) called modernism or positivism, which was in turn
opposed to the theological-alchemical worldview that preceded it.
Each view nonetheless inherited many of its assumptions from the
one it opposed itself to. Discover these things, but take your
time. Just getting started and keeping at it is enough to inoculate you against the superficiality of most academic
analyses, if not enough to produce a cure for whatever you may
already have caught!