Blog posts that talk about various aspects of conducting research studies, including research methods.
In 2017 Elena and I ran the IT3010 course at NTNU on the topic of qualitative research methods in computer science. This was the first time we had the course run as a realistic run-up to a research conference with papers presented by students. The last deliverable in the course was a reflection report where each student was asked to reflect on the who process. Here I want to summarize some tips to students after having graded this last deliverable.
Researchers can be regarded as extreme knowledge workers. A fresh research manager will no doubt face some challenges: How do you lead people who know more than you, who are more intelligent than you, who can think more strategically than you? Management ideas that work for Walmart or for Microsoft will not work for research organizations. But what will work then?
I have now, after three months, finished reading this seminal work on qualitative methods by Corbin and Strauss. I have heard this is the book that defined rigor in qualitative research once and for all. I am not surprised at all.
Most qualitative research is concerned with oral data. But documents can be equally important in improving our understanding of phenomena. And when it comes to documents, it is not only their content that counts.
Are you an innovator? Did you ever make a solution that no one wanted to use? Did you ever reflect on the reason why it happened? If you did, I bet one of the reasons was you lost contact with your users.
Evaluate your new technology like doctors evaluate the effect of a new medicine or a new treatment on patients. In this way you will put your users’ problems into focus instead of being guided and biased by your passion for technology.
Ever since funding agencies started demanding some way to measure a return on their investment, administrators have been coming up with ways to measure scientists’ performance. And scientists have been coming up with ways to maximize their value under any…
There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio…
